Zigrel was in the temple, in the western sunroom where grapes hung to dry in the summer, and students shivered through long, airy, winter lectures. But Zigrel didn’t see any raisins, and she didn’t see any pupils. Was she late? So late the instruction had already recessed? But it wasn’t cold, so…shouldn’t the hall have been filled with drying fruits--or already well-preserved monks?

When was the last time she was alone in the hall? But she wasn’t alone…no, she remembered talking to Wendelo--or was it Pallera? That couldn’t have been a minute hence. In fact, if she could just turn around, certainly she’d see them…

Knock.

But she couldn’t turn around--literally couldn’t. Helplessly, she tried to “bring her feet down,” to step back onto the glass path. But she couldn’t flex her metaphorical feet any better than the ones she kept beneath her ankles.

Knock.

Well that’s not a pleasant sound, Zigrel admitted, and though the fear had already taken her--bringing the sum of her senses into a racing blush in the back of her throat--it had not yet submerged into panic. She still had her wits about her, but…

Was it getting closer? Knock. There were four halls connecting to the sunroom (knock), and Zigrel needed only a quarter turn to see at least three of them.

Knock.

She led with her chin, forcing it sideways, but only ended up tilting her head without any change of direction. Perhaps I’d ought to get to the infirmary, she considered--rather calmly considering her feet wouldn’t budge so much as to pivot beneath her.

Thunk!

No, decided Zigrel, though her heart was racing faster, I wouldn’t want to waste any of the physicians’ time…

Thunk!

It didn’t really sound like footsteps--this had only just occurred to Zigrel, though she effortlessly acknowledged that it hadn’t sounded like footsteps in the first place. It sounded like…

Thunk!

Like leather! The revelation filled her with ecstatic relief. Someone is being whipped in the courtyard! How absolutely regular. Nevermind that she couldn’t move her feet…

Thunk! And yelling. Zigrel rubbed her tired eyes; and with only a few deep breaths, she shrugged off the discomforts of sleeping on a foreign floor. The inn was bright as could be--all the eastern shutters were opened, and toward the southern corner, cold, white sunlight poured over the dirt and the rugs and wooden benches.

Rugs? The fates damn me, but there were rugs? No… There was no reason to be upset. A rug would have been an unnecessary pleasure--a luxury. The packed dirt offered everything she needed for sleep…at least, that’s what she told herself.

Thunk! More yelling. It made it easy to slough off the regret--and the consequent moral quandary.

Thunk! Now there were two sources of yelling and the unpleasant morning call had evolved into pandemonium.

Thunk, thunk! Zigrel shook her head, straightened her back, and pressed her feet back down upon the Glass Path…

“Ah!” The first voice: an old, Noriac lady. Stoneware jangled, fell and shattered. Someone hit the ground. “How dare you do this to me in my place. The senate will hear of this, and they’ll have your pale, blotchy head on a pole!”

“Fuck off, you old bitch!” Naturally, it was the darker of the Sprunishmen. The short and angry one. He snarled like a dog and, Zigrel thought, seemed to yelp like one, too--everytime the old landlady’s leather thong crashed down on his face.

“You’ll pay for this!”

Thunk!

“Stop fucking hitting me, you pruned tart, or I’ll slash your horse-trodden head off!” It wasn’t a conversation--the participants spoke different languages. But Zigrel thought it had a wonderfully comical narrative coherence.

Thunk!

“That does it…” They were both either crouched or prone behind the inn’s main counter--like voice actors in a puppet show--until Mierel came onto his feet, stumbling.

He’s drunk! Where he’d found the time to manage that…

Now he was grasping at the ground, and kicking at something. That something scraped metallically against the dirt and stoneware shards.

He’s not going to… But once he came back up with the sword, there didn’t seem to be enough reason showing in his vivid, bursting face to doubt it. Zigrel sprang forward, but in vain. In a blink, Master Arzado had already appeared, grabbing hold of the old lady and bringing her away from the rabid dog-man like a father sheltering his child from a hungry, wandering pig. Meanwhile, the Sprunish giant had lumbered up to bring his hound under control, grabbing him humiliatingly by the neck of the robe and lifting, so the smaller one had to stand on his toes.

“Fine!” shouted the one called Mierel, “I won’t kill the old bitch. Now let me down!” His companion seemed perfectly content to ignore him, and rather held him there, searching the room stupidly for some sign of how to proceed. Arzado said nothing, but let the old innkeeper grumble off her curses--they were falling on deaf ears, anyway.

Finally, Zigrel snapped at them to shut up. “Sprunishman, do you intend to pay for the damages you’ve caused?” she interrogated, pressing up close enough to smell his beleaguered, wine-hot breath.

What, can a patron not enjoy a drink? Tell the old cunt that I didn’t damage anything. She broke the jars--”

Zigrel firmly slapped his scraggly-haired face. Ayricalt, the giant, opened his eyes wide, but made no effort to retaliate--nor did he stop her when she came back across with the back of her hand. “Quiet,” she commanded. Then she turned to her master. The old woman had begun sobbing, wailing into the merciful crook of Arzado’s arm; but based on the distended grimace of the old Tushikan’s face, it seemed his mercy was wearing thin.

“He’s broken down my door,” uttered the landlady, between cries, “assaulted me, and destroyed my property. He is a Sul, an evil spirit.”

Wicked, maybe, thought Zigrel, but evil might be a stretch. Anyway, he is unquestionably mortal.

“She’s mad about the door, Sprunishman,” she announced, “and the wine.”

“Then tell her the fucking queen will pay for it!”

Zigrel did, if more politely. The old woman did not seem convinced.

“She doesn’t trust you, or maybe she doesn’t trust the queen.”

“Maybe both,” muttered Arzado, but he did so in their native tongue.

The old woman was still sobbing, and Mierel the Sprunishman still foamed at the mouth. Zigrel sighed.

“Listen, missus,” she said to the landlady, ”he promises he’ll pay,” (she had to twist the lie around in her head to make it come out earnestly), “and if you keep attacking him, he’s probably going to murder you. Now my companions and I are hungry, and we’ve been at sea. We want hot food.” Then she fished out a few shekels of silver and displayed them to the lady. “We have money. We’re not robbers.”

“She’s awful jumpy,” said the Litherian girl-man, Baramethi, later, as they sat on benches and ate half-warmed millet pottage with fish.

“Of course she is,” Zigrel reprimanded, “look.” She pointed at the Sprunishman, who sat against the eastern wall, slouched below the lighted shutters. He had hardly touched the pottage--in fact, he had at first treated the meal as something evil, spurning the bowl as it was presented to him. Even Ayricalt, when the food had been identified, had contorted his vacant face into some sad, vaguely disgustful frown.

“No. Islands are not good places for thieves,” he explained. “So islanders don’t typically live in fear of them.”

“You think her reaction was inappropriate?”

“Inappropriate? Ha! No, I think it was appropriate. Just unexpected.” He spoke tenderly, finding the softest bits of gruel and dissolute fish meat to spoon into his prince’s quivering mouth. “Is she worried we’ll flee payment? But where would we go? She’d only need to have a word with the authorities to foil our escape.”

“Hm,” Zigrel added, studying the landlady as she stomped around the room, muttering viciously and casting accusatory glares at the Sprunismen.

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“Under normal circumstances,” Baramethi added, “I’d have wagered that this peasant crone wouldn’t even know what thievery is.” He wiped up a web of dribble from the catatonic prince’s graying beard.

“So, her reaction…” Zigrel prodded.

“It’s suspicious enough,” the Litherian shrugged. “When peasants concern themselves with the proper distribution of justice--it’s an ill omen.”

Zigrel shook her head. “These polities are ‘republican.’ Such societies consider peasant involvement virtuous.”

“Then that’s its own ill,” Baramethi responded evenly. “Still, she didn’t contact the authorities--indeed, for all her grumbling, she still hasn’t. You see that in war torn countries. The peasants will trust their robbers better than they trust their own rulers.”

Zigrel stuck her chin out curiously. Has he even seen a war? she thought, mockingly. He’s hardly out of the crib. And who was he to lecture her?

“Speaking of rulers…” She looked over toward her master, who was already exchanging gruff words with the equally dour King Oberoto and the half-mad Kelcetrix, bird-speaker, who was grinning so widely that it seemed his lips simply weren’t long enough to cover his gleaming teeth. Arzado looked back at her and nodded. “We’ve got a governor to meet.”

She turned to the moping Sprunishmen. The wild one had sat up, some, and now peered out the window from under the lowest shutter. “We ought to go see the governor,” she said to them, more like orders than a suggestion. They both ignored her, one with a petty sneer and one with sheer vacancy.

“…as soon as possible,” she added, speaking as slowly as she might have to the littlest orphan novices.

“Tell us your name,” said the giant, tiredly. “And consider that a command.” The hairy one grinned maliciously.

Zigrel breathed through a blush of impatient fury that felt all too characteristic of her master. She kept her face even almost purely out of filial spite. “I am Zigrel, acolyte of Prighuyt Tuzhk.”

“I am Ayricalt, whom they call ‘Prince of the Karafins,’” he responded, smiling like a satisfied cattle. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. This is Mierel of Ram Valley. Mierel?”

“Nice to finally meet you,” he said sarcastically.

“Great,” Zigrel said, with only a tenuously thin veneer of pleasantry, “so, as I was saying, we have a governor to meet--”

“What’s the rush?” Mierel interrupted, gesturing toward the window behind him. “Give it a minute, and we’ll even have an escort.”

The guards had orders to take all eight. Obviously, Prince Kordos, son of Kolcnos, wasn’t coming, but Baramethi’s insistence on staying with his elder nearly brought the scene to violence. Arzado commandeered the situation, and while keeping the proud, young Litherian demurred, effectively browbeat the guards into accepting only the six.

They climbed the city. Tenements and manor houses clung to the main road, which rose in a long, serpentine curve up the windward slopes of the island. The higher they went, the grander the houses, and the tenements eventually replaced with single-family domiciles. The road was populated by gentlemanly strollers and, intermittently, small congregations of ladies and their servant hosts. They even saw a few curtained litters, borne upon the backs of Sprunish slaves, evident in their long, chestnut ponytails, striding up or down the hill, and at the precipice they saw exactly why.

Three great buildings crowned the hilltop plaza, great granite structures surrounded in tufts of wooden scaffolding. Between them, wealthy people strolled about, speaking hushedly and humorously, trailed by trains of silent slaves and scribes. Their soft conversations were thoroughly drowned by mongering merchants who lined all the pavement, porticos, and a wide square of columned roof which shaded the market proper. Impassioned haggling mixed with barkings of outrageous claims.

“Quite the emporium,” said the Galite king, smiling sadly.

“The city is called Codisurn,” Zigrel reluctantly explained to the Sprunishmen as her master relayed it to the Galites. “It’s not the largest city in the Bluebirds, but it’s in a convenient position between Iyisrinor and Syftulyk.”

“Soft-a-what-now?” grumbled Mierel, whose apparent hangover wasn’t helped any by the day’s cloudless brightness, nor by the incessant sparkling of the plaza’s magnificent granite structures.

“The Ellusenese city,” she sighed. “Perhaps you have erroneously thought that the city was called ‘Ellusen?’”

“Syftulyck, eh?” Then Mierel shrugged. “Though I suppose it doesn’t matter much to me. In Sprune, we call it ‘Ellusen,’ and I’d be guilty of confusing many a drunk if I bothered calling it anything else.”

“Is it not important to you, to call things by their proper names?” She managed to withhold a fair bit of disdain.

“What’s important to me is the audience,” he replied. “‘Understanding truth’ does not require ‘knowing facts.’”

Barbarians! Truly, they would choose to live in darkness!

“I knew what it was called,” the giant jealously interjected.

“Did you now, big man?” Mierel shot back incredulously.

“Of course. After all, I was the one whom the queen invited.”

“Well,” Mierel bitterly admitted, “you’ve got a face that’s hard to forget. But don’t think that just because you get the credit…”

He didn’t finish what he was saying--or if he did, Zigrel didn’t hear it. They now approached the darkened entryway of one of the three main buildings. This one was largely rectangular, its three floors delineated with unending lines of painstakingly relieved images. Small windows arrayed the building, housed in equally elaborately carved frames with columns, vases, flowers, and ocean swells all presented in darkly glittering stone.

A disaffected crowd shadowed the already ominous entryway, and the party’s escorts pressed through the throng with a martial mercilessness. Hands flew, spear butts jabbed out. Screams now punctuated the already clamorous assembly. People fell to the ground, faces dripping blood as they searched the cracked flagstones for misplaced teeth. One guard, a grinning menace, playfully tapped his palm with a blackjack club--when he wasn’t exercising it on the befuddled congregation.

So it was with a bad taste in Zigrel’s mouth that she entered the refitted palace. However, the place was even grander from the inside, and she could hardly distract herself from the spectacle of it. The facade’s careful delineations of stories and rooms proved illusory. There only appeared to be one room--its ceiling some forty feet high, and held up by a terraced pyramid of columns which were invisible from the outside. Light poured in through the raised gaps in the ceiling, so one could almost forget that the windows were there, at all. Instead of upper floors, there was only a single balcony which wrapped around the entire perimeter of the great hall. A wide hearth sat in the center, apparently carved from a single slab of white stone. Not a speck of soot sullied its moon-like surface. Besides that, the room was populated by only a few bare desks, the bag-eyed officers who occupied them, and the notably ghostlike absence of benches, whose fittings, like scars, could still be seen between the floor’s mosaics.

“Ah!” a voice cut through the austere silence of the makeshift bureaucracy, and approached. “Our adventurers! Welcome to Codisurn. I am Lastor Silvertooth.” The man bowed deeply, but curtly. Though he spoke pleasantly enough, he wore no smile. He looked like he hadn’t slept recently, hadn’t dressed recently, and hadn’t seen the light of day since it had come and gone several times over.

“Governor,” said Zigrel, bowing. Arzado nodded, looking he’d smelled something ripe about the disheveled bureaucrat.

“Oh, no. Not ‘governor,’ Lady…”

“Zigrel,” she offered.

“Lady Zigrel,” he continued with a more personal bow. “No, the governor is stationed in Ledreda--a much more prominent city. One which, if I’m not greatly mistaken, you should currently be in.”

“Trouble with pirates,” snapped Arzado.

“Terrible misfortune,” said the administrator, wiping sweat from his flushed face and neck with a handkerchief. He was donned in full Ellusenese armor--a vest of steel chains which descended to his knees, cinched at the waist with a leather belt; a waist-length leather jacket; stiff, woolen trousers; knee-high boots. He’d completed the look with a gray fox-pelt wrapped around his shoulders. Zigrel felt the sweltering heat just looking at him.

“Misfortune, you say?” Arzado hissed. Zigrel looked between them--they might have been the same age. Obviously, Arzado was in finer physical shape, but the administrator--though his hair was peppered with age’s grayness, and his skin no longer stuck firm to his figure--still looked rather vivacious, and his black eyes shimmered with a sore, lazy intelligence. Coyness certainly did not befit him.

He shrugged. “I’ve never considered myself fortunate to meet them, in any case.”

“Interesting,” continued Arzado, still venomous, “because the pirates in question came from your port.”

Lastor smiled sheepishly. “We don’t harbor pirates, Sir…”

If he was fishing for an introduction, Arzado didn’t take the bait. “There is a king, vassal of the Mighty Shu,” he snapped, pointing toward Oberoto. “And beside him, the Prince of the Karafins. Back at that insufferable inn we were forced to stay in, there is a Litherian prince who nearly murdered himself to deal with your pirates. Now, you can fill their simple, royal heads with all the political niceties you’d like, but know now that you are speaking to a master of Prighuyt Tuzhk, which is called ‘the closest to heaven,’ and if you think you can treat me like some buffoonish, courtly plaything, you will be sorely disappointed.”

Lastor, to his credit, didn’t sweat any more by Arzado’s berating. Zigrel, on the other hand, was mortified. Perhaps if the outburst had been leveled at a king (and she didn’t doubt that her master had the gall to do it), he would have seemed irrepressible--impressive. As it was, targeted at middle management, it scarcely seemed more brave than impetuous.

“So you have met the local aristocracy. I daresay that they will offer you no fairer welcome than what they’ve already demonstrated on the seas.” He nodded to Arzado and Zigrel, respectively, and turned to waddle off.

“Wait!” shouted Zigrel. “We’re not here to tackle an insurrection…”

“Indeed,” the administrator agreed. “There is a monster. The monster is killing Ellusenese agents: traders, soldiers…administrators.” He cast a knowing look, and a pained, wry smile. You’re here to hunt the monster--not pirates, nor wealthy Bluebirders. Now, if memory serves, there’s a ship coming in this evening which will leave for Ledreda the day after tomorrow. I’ll make sure you get passage on the vessel, and we can put this unfortunate business behind us.

“In the meantime…” A mean smirk crawled into the tired, old wrinkles of his face. “That ‘insufferable’ inn will just have to be suffered. We’ll clear the account with the proprietrix--you needn’t worry about that.” He looked once more at the Tushikans, wide eyes suggestive. “If that is all…”

“Tell us, at least, about the monster,” grumbled Arzado.

“Ha!” Lastor gleefully erupted, patting heavily the master’s shoulder. “If we knew about the monster,” then, inclining his eyebrows, “or monsters, then I daresay we’d hardly need your help.”

“You can’t seriously--” Zigrel began.

“Are you not the authorities on the subject?” Lastor growled. “That barbarian prince behind you is a noted slayer of monstrosities. The conspicuously absent Litherian you mentioned has slain even divinely anointed warriors. The red-eyed ‘sky shepherds,’ as they’re called, are famed investigators, and the empire of the Shu has more demonic entities in a single peaceful meadow than most countries have in their whole frontiers.

“Furthermore, I had been led to believe that there were none wiser, none cleverer, none more martially or magically inclined than the monks of Prighuyt Tuzhk. No, good Lady Zigrel, and Sir “monk,” I am not holding out on you. Queen Astoriana has acquired the lot of you at great expense--both material and reputational. I suggest you take your responsibilities more seriously.”

As an afterthought, he excused the damage which their ship had perpetrated on the municipal docks, then left. Zigrel and Arzado, who were corralling their party back through the entrance crowd, looked meaningfully at each other.

“What do you think?” Arzado ordered.

“He sounded…earnest,” Zigrel decided.

“Pah!” chortled the master. “He sounded defensive--and flattering, in his own rude way. Whatever. We have a job to do. We’d better get to doing it.”

Zigrel felt instantly aglow, a warming sense of relief--if Master Arzado was committed, then she had no reason to waver. Past the crowd, she could see the whole southern and eastern horizons, a regression of rippling, gray waters.

And she saw the cloud which hung above them, circling the sea like some mythic noose. It ripped the comfort off her like a cold wind takes heat.

Alone, she shivered in the muggy, southern air.