It felt like the entire population of Kibosh was gathered in Tome’s open, the expanse of green grass between the Library and the southern gates.

I knew that wasn’t precisely true. Ease it may have been, but the duty, as Kelly had put it to me, remained on duty—seven people in all, just as when the village had thrown my impromptu Tiering party.

I was a little embarrassed about how relieved I felt that Matron Zeva, the ill-tempered crone with whom I’d had more than one viciously polite spat, was holding down the two Tower duties. I respected her, grudgingly, but I doubted she and I were ever going to have much in the way of pleasant interactions—but I had full confidence that she’d not take the responsibilities for skywatch and communications unless she could handle them.

I felt far more embarrassed at my relief that Mera was on the walls, having demanded a double shift on the western gatehouse. It was a transparent attempt at maintaining some distance from me, and no matter how ridiculous I knew the feelings were, there remained a blend of guilt, embarrassment, and resentment.

It had all been such a production, and in the end I was left in the dark. I wanted to know what happened between her and the Gods; and I hungered to study how she looked and moved now in her body, wrought anew in however much or little part as a divine masterwork.

It was probably for the best. I knew I’d see her again soon enough, probably just long enough to process what we’d talked about. If, in the meantime, she preferred to figure out ways to definitively not be around me… well, not only was the preference valid in and of itself, it suggested underlying reasons that were themselves also valid.

Mera and Zeva’s shifts, I’d heard about on the grapevine; the latter had come from Shuli in the morning, and I’d gotten the hint when Ketana had cheerfully, pointedly gossipped about Mera’s in my vicinity. For the rest, to feed my curiosity, I’d fallen in with a kid named Yamcha, a herder pre-teen—probably; I was getting better at figuring out their ages, but it was still a work in progress—who’d turned out to be the kid who’d played me in towards Kibosh on the day of my arrival.

He’d had a rough time for some reason or other recently, I could tell as much. Still, he was carrying himself in a way that suggested he didn’t want pity or coddling, and he was initially prickly. It was a prickliness I could handle, though, and which I defused by being pointedly ignorant.

It’s hard to feel condescended to by the goofball laughing because she doesn’t know something that everyone knows, and it’s hard to feel patronized when you’re explaining to that same goofball why the duty roster is laid out in a particular way.

It was a constraints puzzle, in a sense. Take the combat-capable people who were least likely to enjoy the late afternoon festivities, not counting any Pillars or Zeva on Tower duty—that gave you Farmer, Rafa, Nagton, Deoro, Uegui, and Mera. Next, apply job constraints; finally, apply constraints based on their… social lives, as far as I could tell.

Uegui, whom I presumed I’d met but couldn’t remember, was apparently part of the Guard. That left him watching the dungeon by default; similarly, Deoro couldn’t be on dungeon duty, on account of being part of Delve. Mera had the western wall by fiat, which felt like a violation of the rules, if she had beef with the Forest. Farmer and Rafa, on the other hand, both couldn’t have the southern wall.

Yamcha didn’t know why, but I suspected that the answer might be Sudh, and Kibosh’s proximity to that border.

Since Nagton worked almost exclusively with metals and lived in his workshop up north in Hammer, he couldn’t be at the dungeon or the northern wall. He took east and Deoro took south; and after apparently a three-minute wordless, gestured conversation that might have been entirely for comedy’s sake, Rafa demanded dungeon-watch and Farmer took the north gatehouse.

Everyone else, all twenty-seven of the children and the other one hundred and thirty nine adults, was starting to shift from milling around in their absurdly gorgeous outfits to being attentive.

The musicians were warming up, and the dancing was about to begin.

I’d gotten a precis of what to expect, mostly coming from Kelly. There’d be a warmup number, distinct from the musicians just warming up on their own, and then they’d play one of the seven traditional Songs of Ease as a purely musical number. The next would follow immediately thereafter, flowing from one measure to the next without a pause, and in that song the dancing would begin.

Not my dancing, thankfully; I’d known that already, even if I hadn’t known any of the other details. James, as Clerk Administrator, would open the first dance with something free-form and improvised between him and Meredith. They wouldn’t know which of the seven Songs they’d be dancing to, but that was a formality after all their decades of doing precisely that—though not with the same songs from decade to decade, or even from year to year.

I had to take a moment for a fit of giggles when Yamcha explained that part. The question of which seven Songs were part of the canonical set for every municipality in the Duchy of Aluf was a matter of civics. From Duchy to Duchy, how they were selected varied a little bit, but they were all fundamentally the same: a Clerkly process broadly centered around balancing popularity, relevance, mastery of composition, difficulty of execution, and a small amount of randomness.

Shem in a nutshell, I thought to myself, snickering, and then I had to explain the joke to Yamcha, which somehow made it funnier for both of us, and then we were out of time to talk, because the music was starting.

Technically, it was only the warmup number; not something that would be expected to command our attention. It wouldn’t, therefore, have been rude to keep talking. In fact, according to Tayir, it was technically rude not to keep talking at least a little, because it imposed an expectation and degree of pressure on the performers beyond what was appropriate.

People didn’t even pretend. They—we, really—fell into an almost immediate silence at the first beats of Hitz’s drum, and in a ripple of motion the village drifted into a broad arc around the waiting musicians.

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There were seven of them, standing or sitting on stools in a vague clump, six of whom I knew. Hitz was in the center, sitting with their hands poised in the air in front of an angled drum that looked like three drums had a kid together, with Safra and Tathis—from Kasménos’s team of delvers—on each side. Tathis had a long double-flute looking thing held out to the side, and Safra’s hands were wrapped inside a split-barrel woodwind with a long, curved mouthpiece.

Avachin, whom I’d met but whose job as a general-purpose processor of magical raw materials I didn’t remember until Spark reminded me, was playing something halfway between a pan flute and bagpipes, and Ellana—the First Friend I hadn’t been assigned to—had a spike fiddle that, judging by the support she had around her waist, could also be played in some sort of hip-mounted configuration. Kan rounded out the familiar faces, surrounded by a semicircle of bizarre, curving pipes with odd protrusions and holes.

The seventh person was a severe-faced woman on the late end of middle age, and she looked markedly different. With salt-worn and weather-beaten skin, striking patterns of colors on thick furs, and skin so black it looked to have blue tones, she was another reminder to me that Kibosh was a simple village in a backwater Kingdom.

There was an entire rest of the world out there, and at least some of them had sailors who played instruments like… not a harp, but not entirely unlike a harp.

“A hammered threadsong,” Yamcha breathed in wonder. “She plays a hammered threadsong. This is going to be wildfire.”

“I have no idea what that is,” I murmured, smiling. There was a quiet stirring among the crowd as people got settled, sitting on the grass or finding benches and chairs, and I could see the musicians leaning in towards each other and talking. “People seem excited, though.”

“I’ve never seen one,” the kid told me. “But Clerk James told me about them once. She’s gonna hit the strings with hammers, and if she’s real good, she’ll have more hammers’n she can even hold.”

“Wouldn’t someone that good be, like, a professional? So they can’t play during Ease?” I frowned as a thought hit me. I settled to the ground deliberately, making myself trust in the self-cleaning enchantments that’d so easily handled the sweat on my outfit. “How does Singer Tamaya handle it?”

“They say if you walk the fields during Ease and sing, she’ll sing with you.” Yamcha’s voice shook a little, but he was obviously trying to play it cool, so I pretended not to notice. “You need to be in the trackless grass, where it looks like the plains don’t ever end, and where nobody else can hear you, Mama Dora said. Otherwise it’s like you’re bragging.”

“Like you’re special.” It wasn’t exactly a question, though the boy nodded anyway. “How is this not special? Everyone whispering with their eyes on Hitz?”

“It’s ‘cause this ain—isn’t Hitz’s… what they do?”

“It’s a hobby?”

“Yeah. Yeah, ‘cause see, Kan, he’s Stone Team, yeah?”

“Stone Team member, engineer, quilter.” I tilted my head back, thinking. “So he can be special as, like, a musician or something else if he wants, because he’s not… doing it for real?”

“Close ‘nuff, I guess.” He squinched his face up in frustration. “I can’t explain it better.”

“Mmm. It’s fine.” It really was—I wasn’t going to demand that a kid resolve the contradictions between adult social dynamics and a half-story, half-rule handed down to a child. The immediately important part was just understanding… not why things were structured this way or that way, not the difference between excellent and special, but how I was supposed to act. If I’d had an obligation to moderate my enjoyment of the music, well, I’d have at least tried.

Best effort, absolutely. But I was having enough trouble not staring at everyone around me—most people weren’t as dressed to the nines as Kelly and I were, but everyone was a riot of color and beauty. Keeping my gaze remotely respectful while also policing my auditory appreciation would have been basically impossible.

Forget the crowd, forget the impossibly diverse range of styles and colors; I couldn’t focus on any one person long enough to even take in what they were wearing. Just what the performers were wearing was a masterclass in fashion and aesthetics I wasn’t qualified to fully appreciate, though I was certainly doing my best.

From Avachin’s tight robe draped with dozens of small, draping panels in a wild range of colors to the stranger’s plain tan jacket that shrouded her from neck to calf, there was an unbelievable range of complexity in terms of design. From Ellana’s simple-yet-elegant formal gown in a shade just redder than mahogany to Hitz’s thin, embroidered jacket of a thousand subtly-differentiated shades of color, there was an equally impossible-to-grasp range of colors and palettes.

And the performers really were the more sedate of everyone present. They were wearing clothes that they knew they’d be performing in; the rest of the audience might not have been dressed as intricately as I was, but I wasn’t an outlier.

Mishke, Tomas’s husband in the Guard, was an outlier. In a way, though, he was a proxy for Tomas’s own skill. Everyone knew who made his clothes, which made him a walking advertisement in the stark, tight faux-armor clothes that were both impossibly intricate and left absolutely nothing about his heroic physique to the imagination. But pretty much everyone was dressed in something that showed off… something, something that was tickling at the back of my mind.

Before I could figure out what it was, my musings were interrupted as I caught a blur of motion out of the corner of my eye. Looking up, I saw Hitz’s hand coming up with a long, slender mallet and tapping the head of one of their drums in barely-perceptible fast, gentle touches. The sound built to a soft rolling thrum of sound, and they stepped back as their drum came vertical and the sound faded.

And then they all started warming up together into the attentive silence.

I had no capacity to properly appreciate the music, or to even understand it. I wouldn’t have been able to do either of those even if it had been musicians of equivalent caliber back on Earth. With instruments that I’d never heard before, with musical styles that were alien and unfamiliar?

The best I could say was this:

Avachin’s pipes provided a drone that the other instruments built on, and the pan flute—along with Tathis’s double-flute—danced around it, providing a counterpoint. Ellana’s fiddle howled as she bowed it, and her fingers flew as she somehow seemed to bow two strings at a time while also plucking a third for percussive effect. Safra’s instrument sounded like a chorus of woodwinds, reedy and full of burr and edge, and Kan’s hands were a blur as he slapped the openings in the pipes surrounding him for a sound like orchestral bells, resonant and yet somehow also pure.

Hitz drummed, hands pausing between blurs, visibly holding themself back from their full speed. Their mallets gave a rolling, thundering rhythm as they swayed in place, coaxing a half-dozen different kinds of sound out of just the one vertical drum face in front of them.

Their sound shifted in tiny ways as they played, and within thirty seconds it was different somehow, like they were blending together instead of stepping on each other’s toes.

In that exact moment, as though she’d been waiting for her cue, the stranger tossed two not-exactly-drumsticks into the air, short lengths of wood with what looked like bulbous bulges on each end. She yipped excitedly as she caught them on their way down, spinning them above her head and looking up to the skies.

Her hammers came down across the strings, and the world stood still.