When Inhei was nine years old, his mother introduced him to the alley gods.

She chose a bright, hot, cloudless day, while his father was at work on the soaring scaffolds that folded around the temple’s south side. Leaving his older brother in charge of the younger siblings, she led him by the hand across the Pedlars’ Bridge, through the busy tollgate and into the winding maze of western Kursalian.

Inhei’s sandals kicked up dust and sent pebbles skittering over the worn cobbles as they pressed through the noonday crowds. These streets were familiar to him. He knew the way they rose and fell over the steep hills that Kursalian had grown upon. He was the one his mother always sent to run errands, to buy rolls of flax for her in the Street of Banners, or smoked meat in the Street of Spears. The temple loomed over them all the way, its vast golden dome rising above the ridged rooftops like a squat mountain. When the sun was low, its shadow darkened half the city.

“Where are we going?” he asked her, as they wove their way uphill, keeping to the shade of shop-awnings where they could. The markets were teeming today. Inhei had to raise his young voice over the jabbering cries of the hawkers.

“A little further,” his mother replied.

They passed a wardens’ tower, high and windowless with a gold-domed roof, like the temple writ small. Inhei’s mother gave it a nervous glance. She quickened her stride and tightened her hold on his hand. Inhei let himself be pulled along, higher and higher up the hillside. He looked back over his shoulder, at the patchwork of rooftops sloping away below, clouded by drifts of chimney-smoke. In the far distance, mountains sawtoothed the blue horizon to the west.

At last, they turned into a tight side-alley between a rundown chandlery and a potter’s workshop. Inhei realised, in mounting confusion, that this was a place he hadn’t been before. The alley was so narrow at first that he and his mother had to walk in single file, until it widened and branched behind the chandlery. The backs of houses leaned together over the rough cobbles, their eaves nearly touching in places. After the heat of the climb, the shade of the alley was pleasantly cool. There was nobody about, only a scrawny grey cat which bristled and leapt for a fencetop when Inhei approached it.

His mother stopped her purposeful stride by the back door of a shuttered old house. Its roof was missing half its tiles and its plaster was riven by long cracks, but there was a stripe of sunset-orange chalk running above the door’s lintel, vibrant and recent. He asked her why she had brought him here.

“There are gods here,” she told him, in a voice hushed with sudden reverence. She glanced up and down the alley’s crooked length. “They are in the alleys, in all the quiet places of the city. They move on the wind. The temple won’t speak of them. But there are people here who know how to find them. I am one such, and so will you be.”

Like every child in Asequhra, Inhei knew the gods of the temple. He’d learned their names before he learned to walk. The Father-to-All, god of gods, and his sons, the sculptors of the mountains and painters of the sky. He knew by heart the prayers and the chants, the offerings to be made for health and wisdom, the petitions to be made for the dead. He bowed to the black-hooded temple wardens when he passed them in the street. He tied a carmine devotional sash around his waist each morning, and knelt in the temple courtyard for the dusk prayers, along with his parents and siblings and all their neighbours.

These alley gods, he did not know.

He learned, later, that they were the gods of his mother’s childhood. She had not been born in Kursalian, like Inhei’s father and siblings and Inhei himself had been. She was the daughter of a herdsman, from a green valley cradled by the great mountain peaks of Asequhra’s southern edge. Out there, the temples of the Father-to-All were little more than gilt-roofed huts, and she had never seen a warden until she came to the city. She had come as an orphan in search of work, scarcely older than Inhei was now. She brought with her nothing but the clothes on her back and the gods of her hometown.

When he asked her their names, she said they were nameless. Or rather – and she paused here, considering how to explain it to him, a bright child but a child nonetheless – their names could not be spoken, could not be invoked like the gods of the temple. No burnt-offering would earn their favour, no misdeed would draw their wrath. They were things of presence, not of words; sought out, not summoned.

She asked him if he understood. He lied that he did.

“When we pray to them, we do not pray aloud,” she went on, her voice still soft, furtive. She led him further through the alley, towards a narrow junction shaded by an old olive tree. “We take them into ourselves, in a way. They give us strength. They remember us when we are gone. They remind us of who we are, and that we are not alone, however far from home we may be.”

The alley gods were faceless as well as nameless, Inhei learned. There were no shrines in their honour, no splendidly winged and crowned figures like the carvings on the temple walls. Anything so obvious would have drawn the wardens like crows to a carcass.

Theirs were simpler icons, glimpses of colour and shape hidden in plain sight. The orange chalk above the doorframe was a common one, but there were many others. A daub of red paint, slashed bright across greying plaster like a blood-splatter. Whorls and hooks of chalky blue and ochre, hidden by a drooping awning. Charcoal-black circles stippling a white wall. A grid of violet ribbons stretched taut between two slanted rooftops. All these, Inhei came to know as the signs of the gods. There were more valley folk in Kursalian than he had ever realised, and it seemed each of them had painted up a god of their own.

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“Which one is yours?” he asked his mother, after she had showed him the god-marks in half a dozen sunbleached alleys.

She laughed, a sweet sound. She was a young woman, much younger than Inhei’s father, and beautiful, to Inhei at least. “None of them are mine, love. The gods do not belong to anyone, any more than we belong to them. They just are. They are a part of the world, and a part of us.”

“But…we pray at the temple. We make offerings. You do it, as well.” Inhei looked down at the devotional sash looped around his waist. The words of a hundred rote-learned prayers echoed in his mind. “I thought those were our gods.”

Her jaw tightened suddenly. There was sadness there, deeply-buried, which Inhei had never seen in her before. “Those are foreign gods. They were brought by the temple, when they built Kursalian. But there were gods in the mountains long before that.” She took both his hands in hers. “The wardens want them buried. They try to deafen us with prayers and chants until we forget. It is up to us, you and me, to remember.”

Inhei was silent for a moment. He tried to balance, in his mind, the world of the temple he knew and the new quiet world of these alley gods. His mother, kneeling in prayer in the temple courtyard with the rest of the women; his mother, confessing aloud that she was what the wardens called an idolatress. It was like trying to piece the bricks of a crumbled wall back together. He did not yet know that he would be trying to rebuild that wall for the rest of his life.

He asked her if his father knew of these gods.

“Yes. When we were courting, I told him,” his mother replied. “He said I should not teach you of them. But I told him I must. One child of ours, at least, must learn that there is truth outside the temple. And you are such a clever boy, and quiet. I knew it would have to be you. In time, maybe your brothers and sisters can learn as well.”

They retraced their steps to the chalk-marked house behind the chandlery. The grey cat was toying with a rag in the gutter; it scarpered once more at their approach.

Inhei’s mother glanced towards the narrow slice of busy street ahead, her eyes watchful and again a little sad. “You can’t speak of this to the neighbours, love,” she said, squeezing Inhei’s hand in entreaty. “You know how they gossip. The wardens would hear.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Inhei promised her, with all the sincerity his nine-year-old heart could muster. His palms were sweaty, not with fear but rather a curious, nameless excitement. The delight at being entrusted with a gift. The joy of keeping a secret.

*

On the way home, in the Street of Bells, they came across Chehga, the old yarn-spinner who lived across from them, coming out of a bakery. They heard her before they saw her. She wore long rattling strings of coloured wooden beads around her neck and over her shoulders, a once-popular fashion that had died out for everyone but herself.

Nobody on their street liked old Chehga. She was rude, sour, a peeker through windows, a spreader of rumours. The other old women avoided her and her clacking beads. The little children whispered that she drank blood.

Inhei’s mother once told him that Chehga had been a temple servant in her youth, a tender of the flames. “They threw her out, because she loved a priest and made him break his oaths. She begged at the temple doors to be let back in, but the wardens drove her away. Her family disowned her. So she came here, and she’s been here ever since, poor woman.”

“She might’ve chosen a different street to plague,” Inhei’s father had muttered to that.

Occasionally, when Inhei’s mother made more bread than their household needed, she would give a hunk of it to Chehga. The old woman did not thank her for it – she thanked no-one for anything – but she would nod to her, and did not glare at her the way she glared at Inhei himself.

Chehga gave him that glare now, as he followed his mother down the slanting steps of the Street of Bells. He was glad when they were out of her sight.

All the way back to the Pedlars’ Bridge, Inhei noticed bright marks in alleys and passageways. He couldn’t understand how he had never noticed them before. His unlearned eyes must have slid over them, taking them for simple decorations. He knew now that he would see them everywhere. When he saw the breeze spin up a little whirlwind of dust in an alleyway near the tollgate, his heart thrilled. They move on the wind, he thought.

Shops and stalls clung like bright limpets to the sides of the bridge, some with their back rooms hanging out over the river on crooked stilts. The sellers called out to Inhei and his mother, who knew them all well, though they’d seldom bought anything off them. “Salt cod, lovely Mera! Honey cakes for your little ones! Inhei, dear boy, new sandals for you, the best calf-leather! How about a new cloak for your father, to keep the wind off him on the scaffolds?”

They passed on, through all the jabber and the promises of unmissable bargains, to the narrow mouth of their street. The balconies above were crowded railing-to-railing, forming a little avenue of their own across which the women of the neighbourhood swapped stories as they hung out their linen to dry. Inhei had to hide his grin, to act as though everything was normal, while his mother greeted her friends up above.

Back in the warm stone-tiled confines of their kitchen, his mother set an urn of tea to boil while Inhei played with his younger siblings. He found it hard to focus on their noisy games of pretend, now that the alley gods swooped and flitted through his mind. In his half-formed imagining, they were great silent birdlike things, each adorned with its own pattern of colours. They whirled and soared through the city on tattered wings, scant feet above the heads of the people, mischievously invisible. Already, the secret felt too big to contain.

He thought he might tell his older brother, who was never so good a scholar as Inhei was, but was dependable, never a boaster or a gossiper. Him first, then, if his mother agreed, the younger ones. He imagined leading them all around the winding alleys across town, showing them each vivid marking and naming the god behind it with priestly authority. That the gods had no names was a slight complication, true, but he was sure he could find a way around it.

Inhei’s father returned from the scaffolds a little earlier than usual that evening, dusty and bruised but bright-eyed and full of laughter. He brought a cut of spiced lamb bundled under his arm. Inhei’s mother scolded her husband for spending his wage so recklessly, but she smiled as she did it, and the children practically bounced with glee. Lamb was a rare treat for them, and it was a very good cut.

They thanked the temple gods for the meal, as usual. But during the prayer, Inhei met his mother’s gaze across the kitchen table, and saw the twinkle of mischief in her eyes. He thought he had never loved her so much as he did then.