Inhei’s father did not live long after the wardens came. His injuries healed, but something of him had gone with his wife, never to return. He ate less and less – though Inhei and his siblings tried their hardest to feed him – and spoke hardly at all. Every evening, he would pull up a chair in the front room, and stare wordlessly for hours at the broken door through which Inhei’s mother had been taken.

Within a month, he had weakened to the point he could no longer work. He’d always been a thin man. Now his ribs and cheekbones showed sharply through his drawn skin. He lay in his bed and drew shallow, rattling breaths, in and out, like the wind in a dusty alley. He refused the soup Inhei made for him, rarely even accepted tea. Inhei’s older brother scraped together what little money they had left, and went to fetch a physician from the Lower Apothecaries.

The doctor, a fussy little baldheaded man, came with a wooden case of medicines. He sat by the bedside and sorted through the racks of tinctures and nostrums, thumbing the bottles and muttering to himself. He hardly looked at Inhei’s father, who lay bundled in his blankets, staring at the flyblown ceiling. At last, the doctor took out a vial of some thin reddish liquid, like dilute blood. He held it up to the light.

“Give this to him,” he told Inhei and his siblings. “The whole bottle. You can mix in some honey, for the taste.”

“Will it make him eat again?” Inhei’s older brother asked.

The doctor shook his head. “It is root-of-peace. It will put him to sleep. There will be no pain.” He boxed up his medicines and left without a backwards glance.

They had no money for another doctor. The vial of red death rested on a windowsill, untouched and unlooked-at, for two more weeks, while Inhei’s father withered in his bed. Once in a while, he might faintly groan “Mera”. He said nothing else. Having no other choice, Inhei’s older brother went to labour on the temple scaffolds with the other men of their district. Inhei and the younger ones stayed home and tended to their father. Some days, the neighbour’s wife was kind enough to bring them flour and oil, or garden vegetables wrapped in cloth.

Finally, there came the day when Inhei’s father began to wheeze and shudder. Weak coughs convulsed his chest. He was a skeleton in sheets now, hard even to look at. Inhei’s older brother came home, caked in dust and bloody-knuckled from his work on the scaffolds, and found Inhei kneeling by the bed, biting his tongue to keep the tears back. The younger children had been sent to the neighbour’s house, to spare them.

Inhei’s brother put his dusty hand on Inhei’s shoulder. “Give it to him,” he said quietly.

They poured the root-of-peace into a bowl of lukewarm tea, and stirred in a spoon of honey, like the doctor had said. Inhei brought it to his father’s lips.

“Mera,” his father whispered. His eyes stared straight ahead, unseeing. “Where’s my Mera?”

Inhei tipped up the bowl, and watched his father drink the tea in slow, feeble gulps.

*

The husband of an idolatress could not be buried in the temple grounds. There would be no grave-marker for Inhei’s father, nor any petition to the gods for his spirit. Inhei and his siblings found a boatbuilder on the Pedlars’ Bridge willing to make them a crude raft, so that their father could be set adrift on the river, like the paupers and the pagans.

The neighbours were kind enough. They brought over bundles of flowers, and a flaxen wrap for the body. But they would not come to the funeral. They did not want the wardens’ eyes to fall upon them, too.

Inhei and his older brother washed their father’s body and bound him up in the wrap. They forbade the younger ones from helping, even though they begged to. When the wrapping was complete, they lifted the body between them – it weighed so very little – and tied it to the funeral raft, which had been set on a rented grocer’s cart.

As he and his siblings wheeled the rickety, bumping cart towards the bridge, Inhei was aware of the eyes of the neighbourhood upon them, peeking in silence from a hundred balconies and windows. He did not look up at them, did not take his eyes off the road ahead. His face burned from the effort of keeping in his tears. A few escaped, despite his best efforts, and he could not lift his hands from the cart to wipe them away.

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Night was falling by the time they reached the river’s edge. A sea of lanterns and lit windows glowed on the hillsides ahead, leading up in twinkling waves to the great dark walls of the temple. Merchants’ barges sat heavy in the quiet water, laden with goods from the western cities, from Om Aledai and Sirethe. Faint laughter and snatches of music drifted over the water from the taverns and smoking-dens on the far side.

Inhei had never set foot in those taverns, but he knew them well. He had seen the god-marks on their walls.

He was the one who pushed the raft out across the water. His brothers and sisters wept and prayed aloud to the Father-to-All, on their knees in the river mud, as they’d been taught. But he stayed standing, watching the raft and its white-wrapped cargo drift off downstream, turning in a slow circle, to be lost among the other flotsam in the darkness. He offered up the silent prayer his mother had taught him, the prayer to the alley gods.

*

With his older brother now the family’s sole breadwinner, Inhei was left to care for the younger children. He no longer had time to run errands for the shopkeepers; the most he could do was beg the ones who’d liked him best for food. A few of them took pity on him. Others, muttering darkly about idolatry, warned him not to return.

The neighbours, his mother’s friends, still showed some kindness. They sometimes let the little ones eat at their table, under the strict condition that they kept out of sight if the wardens came near.

Even with such charity, the money Inhei’s brother brought in was barely enough to keep them from starving. So they sold their parents’ things off, piece by piece, for bread and oil and salt fish. His mother’s festival dress with its colourful tassels, his father’s best razor, a looking-glass edged in real silver that their late grandmother had given them. Before long, there was little left to sell.

And still, every day, Inhei and his siblings trudged to the temple courtyard for the public prayers. Officially, as children, they were not to blame for the sins of their mother. But the taint was undeniable, an invisible mark on them all. The other children would not sit near them. Whispers and dirty looks followed them wherever they went. Inhei sat through the sermons with his eyes burning with unshed tears, refusing to cry like the younger ones often did. He thought of the alley gods, which had not saved his mother or his father. They teach us to endure.

The worst thing of all was old Chehga. She sneered from her doorway whenever he went past her house, saying nothing, just watching him like a vulture in rags. He watched her bow and scrape for the wardens, even though they must have hated her as much as everyone else did. He wished they would come for her as they had for his mother.

A month after his father’s funeral, he finally went to confront her. When his brother was at work and the little ones were with the neighbours, he went across the street to her house. The door stood open to let in the breeze, and he walked straight in, propelled by a black fury.

Chehga was seated at her spinning-wheel, turning its crank with one hand and working the spun yarn from the spindle with the other. Finished lengths of yarn were draped over a crude wooden frame propped against the wall next to the equally crude bed. Painted stone pots were lined up on the mantelshelf above a simple brick cave of a fireplace. It was a meagre place, Inhei thought, with not even a rug to soften the bare stone floor.

The old woman glanced his way, without interest, then went back to her work. “Mera’s boy,” she said. “Come to trouble me, for what? I have no money to give you.”

“You told the wardens.” Inhei’s voice was strange to his own ears, somehow toneless and faraway. This was what real hatred sounded like, he realised. Not shouting and snarling – flat and dead. “After she brought you food, shared our bread with you. You made them take her away.”

“I made them do nothing, boy,” Chehga rasped. “The wardens are the hands of the temple. The hands of the gods. All they do is the temple’s will.”

“Father died because of it. He wasted away without her.”

The old woman shrugged her shoulders, making her strings of beads rattle. She did not look up from her spinning-wheel. “The temple’s will,” she repeated. “She brought demons into the city. The false gods of the herder-folk. If evil is allowed to make its home in Kursalian, it will never leave. We will all be cursed. Do you understand that, boy? Do you think you know better than the gods?”

Inhei stood in the doorway, listening to the wind whistle down the street and scatter drifts of dust into the alleys. His hands curled into trembling fists as he stared at Chehga, still hunched over her busy wheel, still not looking at him. She was a stick-insect of a woman, a scarecrow of brittle bone and papery skin. He was a strong boy, tall for his age. He could take one of the stone pots from the mantel and bash her skull in, as easily as he could smash the delicate spokes of the spinning-wheel. He could toss her body into the black water beneath the Pedlars’ Bridge, or drag it into the darkest corner of the darkest alley to be a meal for the rats. Nobody would be too bothered. Nobody on their street liked old Chehga. Not even the gods liked old Chehga.

Don’t, whispered the wind.

Chehga stopped her wheel and turned her head, a birdlike and suspicious motion. Finally, she raised her beady eyes to his face. “Why are you still here, boy? Get out of my house. Go pray for your mother, if you care so much for her.”

Inhei did as he was told.