The Burning Land

Chapter 2

Full night had fallen by the time Gyalo reached the monastery to which he was assigned. Properly, he should have had rooms in the Evening City; but Shapers were in short supply, and the Brethren’s aides, who normally performed only temple service, had been temporarily parceled out among the monasteries and nunneries to fill the gap. Above the entrance, the Five Foundations of the Way of Ârata were written out, so that no one should enter here but with thought of the god: Faith, Affirmation, Increase, Consciousness, and Compassion. Gyalo touched his thumb and smallest finger to his eyelids in the sign of Ârata as he passed beneath.

Until recently, this monastery had been empty. The Caryaxists had blockaded Baushpar soon after they took control of Arsace, making it almost impossible for tradesmen or travelers to get into the city. Departure was permitted, though, and within a decade the secular population had vanished, seeking better conditions elsewhere. The vowed Âratists, left behind, cared for the city as best they could; but since vowing the Way was now forbidden, there were no new postulants to take the place of the monks and nuns who died. The Brethren, returning in triumph, found a place of ghosts, its buildings derelict, its streets littered with debris.

Yet beneath the deterioration, Baushpar was whole. The city was an ancient and powerful symbol, gifted to the faith by King Fârat, an early convert of the First Messenger, who had made the Way of Ârata the state religion of Arsace. It was from Baushpar that Marduspida sent his followers out to preach the word of the god in foreign lands. It was to Baushpar that Marduspida retired when he could no longer travel; it was in Baushpar that he died. Even the Caryaxists, apparently, had been unwilling to challenge such a weight of history--or perhaps, more pragmatically, they had simply feared that to destroy the holy city would tip the people of Arsace over the line into revolt.

Over the year and a half since Santaxma had regained the throne, vowed Âratists from every kingdom of Galea had poured into the city, eager to assist in the task of restoring Baushpar to its former glory. The secular population returned also, reclaiming abandoned villas, opening shops and re-establishing businesses. In some areas the work was only begun: the Evening City, for instance, where the wealth of ornament and artwork must be painstakingly recreated from imported materials. In others it went more quickly. The refurbishment of this monastery had already been complete six months ago, when Gyalo arrived.

The evening meal was in progress in the ground-floor dining hall. The food smelled enticing; but Gyalo turned away, and climbed the wide staircase to the third floor where the Shapers lodged. In Rimpang he had had a suite to himself, but here he had only a single chamber. It was comfortably furnished, with ochre-tinted plaster walls, two round windows covered by hinged wooden screens, and a cabinet bed with carved doors. Everything had been beautifully restored; there was no obvious sign that the chamber had stood abandoned for decades. But he had lived here long enough to mark the spots where different graining spoke of replaced floorboards, to count the cracks in the worktable’s mother-of-pearl inlay, and to learn by heart the shape of the mildew stains on the shelves of the storage cupboard--a subtle legacy of damage, persisting beneath the bright façade of renewal.

Sitting down in the room’s only chair, he drew his simulacrum from beneath his gown, took it off, and laid it before him on the table. His taste for luxury was modest; this necklace, purchased from a renowned Rimpang jeweler, was one of the few extravagances of his life. Its chain and wire cage were neither brass nor silver-gilt but pure gold; the jewel inside, somewhat smaller than the Bearer’s, was glass--but cut, not molded, its facets sharp enough to wound, as the real Blood’s were. Inside the jewel glittered a representation of the flame at the Blood’s heart. Gyalo had asked the jeweler how it had been incorporated into the glass; the man refused to say, but swore that his was the most faithful reproduction available anywhere. Having seen the real Blood close, Gyalo knew the jeweler had not lied. The flame was static and did not shed light, but in all other ways it was a remarkably accurate representation.

Never before had it failed to give him pleasure. Yet in this moment, the memory of the true Blood fresh in mind, it seemed cheap--a bauble, a gimcrack. He had thought it an act of reverence four years ago to spend nearly a year’s allowance on it; now it seemed merely vanity. Better, almost, to have kept the knot of molded glass he had worn before--a thing that represented, as all simulacra must, but did not dissemble, as this one did.

He put it on again. It settled heavily against his chest, cool at first, warming with his body heat. At least, he told himself with half-hearted irony, it would not tarnish with his sweat and turn his skin green, as he traveled in the Burning Land. A small value, for the fortune it had cost.

The Burning Land.

He had spent much time wondering, before this afternoon, what might lie behind the Bearer’s summons. But even his wildest speculations had not approached the truth: that deep within the desert exiled Âratists might survive, either by the miracle of some unknown oasis or the practice of the basest apostasy; and that he, Gyalo Amdo Samchen, was to be part of the expedition sent to find them. In the time it had taken him to cross Baushpar, the idea had lost none of its strangeness. Even now it now made him feel unsteady, as if the floor beneath him were not quite solid.

Intellectually, he understood why he had been chosen. Yet it was precisely true, what he had told the Bearer--he was a man of thought, of learning, who had passed the whole of his life within the sheltering confines of Rimpang’s great Âratist complex, and, until King Santaxma’s restoration to the throne, had never thought to leave it. Though he had read widely, he possessed little direct experience of the world, little firsthand knowledge of its hardships. The greatest hunger he had ever felt was the pang of a missed meal. The greatest injury he had ever suffered was an arm broken in childhood. The deepest exhaustion he had ever known was the fatigue of a footrace, a tiredness that carried with it a trained athlete’s assumption of quick recovery.

According to the accounts he had read over the past days, the Burning Land was a place of unmatched brutality--an endless expanse of rock and sand and scrub, where the sun beat like a hammer on the helpless earth and rain fell only rarely. Few who went in came out. Those who did reported no inland rivers, no hidden pockets of abundance to succor the wanderer. Even if, as the Bearer said, there were men who knew how to survive in such a place, travel would be grueling. How would he withstand those trials? Would he endure with honor? Would his weakness shame him?

Would he return?

That was the real question, of course. It had hovered, unspoken, behind the Bearer’s instructions; it rose like a wall now inside Gyalo’s mind. It was not quite the first time he had faced the possibility of dying. In the decade and a half of chaos and civil war that followed on the death of the Voice of Caryax, many regions of Arsace had fallen entirely to lawlessness; journeying to Baushpar, he had traveled roads roamed by bandits and renegade Caryaxists, who were said to kill vowed Âratists on sight. But his party, which included Utamnos, had been guarded by a full company of Exile cavalry, providing not just a promise of protection but a deterrent to attack. In the desert, the enemy was not physical. It could not be fought off with bows and swords. A display of force would not discourage it.

Consciousness, he thought, invoking the Fourth Foundation of the Way. I am conscious now: of my fear of dying, of my fear that I may prove myself less strong than I would wish. I know my capabilities, but only within the limits of my life till now. How will I fare, when I am tested?

Yet even as he stood before his fear and named it, he was aware that fear was only part of what he felt. Something else, brighter and more urgent, had been planted in him today. To walk in the footsteps of the First Messenger. To set his feet upon sacred ground--not in the random wandering of a pilgrim, not in the defilement of the Caryaxists, but in the dedicated service of Ârata. To see, perhaps, the ancient signs of the gods’ titanic struggle--parched channels where rivers had run, the shadows of leaves etched into rock, the ghostly traces of a land that once had been as verdant as Arsace. He, Gyalo Amdo Samchen, would experience those things. What might he discover in the Burning Land? What might he learn?

He caught his breath. Since he could remember, he had sought knowledge. Yet even as he acquired it, he recognized the limits of his learning, bounded as it was by his worldly inexperience and his confinement in Rimpang. These limits had been transcended by the Brethren’s return to Baushpar, which allowed him to cross a land and explore a city he had known only in tales, almost as a myth. In the past months, however, as wonder faded into familiarity, he had realized, with an understanding that was not quite acceptance, that he had simply come to another place he would never leave.

Now, though, he would leave--on a journey that might take his life, but would also teach him more than he had ever imagined he might know. And not from books, but firsthand, through his own direct experience. This was what he wanted. Through his fear, he knew it--this journey. This chance. This change. No matter what lay at the end of it.

For a little longer he sat at the table, dreaming. At last he got to his feet and crossed to the meditation alcove set into the space between the end of the cabinet-bed and the outside wall. He lit a cone of incense and settled himself on the cushioned meditation bench, back straight, hands loose upon his thighs. Closing his eyes, he began the breathing exercises that would aid his descent into contemplation.

Ârata could not be prayed to: sleeping, he did not listen. Even among vowed Âratists, there were many who preferred to approach the god in a less distant guise, through one or another of his Aspects--facets of his personality dreamed into being over the course of his eonic slumber, directly active in the world and therefore capable of hearing the prayers of those who followed them. But Gyalo had never been drawn to these bits and pieces of the larger whole. It was the totality that called him--Ârata himself, utterly inaccessible to human consciousness and yet profoundly immanent within the world. For those who worshipped in this way, the only path was meditation, undertaken in the knowledge that the barrier of Ârata’s oblivion could not be pierced, but only mirrored a little within the limits of the human soul.

Usually Gyalo descended into the darkness within himself, riding the ebb and flow of breath. Today, though, an image possessed his mind. He seemed to fly above an ocean of scarlet sand, an undulating eternity of aureate light and burning dunes. Deeper he went, and deeper. The world of grass and water fell away. Far off, at the red horizon, the hills seemed to hold the contours of a sleeping face, too vast to be properly apprehended: the face of Ârata, waiting for him in the wilderness.

#

Two days later Gyalo was summoned by the Daughter Sundit. He was generally familiar with all the Brethren, from his duties for Utamnos and the council meetings he had attended; but he had actually come face to face only with a few, for the Brethren associated mainly with one another, avoiding contact with ordinary mortals beyond the members of their own private staffs. Sundit, a close friend to Utamnos, was one of the few. Characteristically, she did not make him stand while she spoke to him, as other Sons or Daughters might have, but bid him be seated and served him refreshments. Her briefing was thorough. By the time he was dismissed, he knew the route the expedition would take to Thuxra City inn by inn and monastery by monastery, and had learned how it would be equipped down to the last tent pole.

“We may not know what you’ll find in the Burning Land,” she told him in her matter-of-fact way. “But we can at least be absolutely certain of how you reach it.”

The military escort arrived within the week: a cavalry company of twenty commanded by a captain named Teispas dar Ispindi. As the leader of the expedition’s religious contingent, Gyalo was called again to Sundit’s chambers to be introduced. Teispas was a compact man in his mid thirties, with hawkish features and black hair; he was smoothly polite, with the proper degree of respect for Gyalo’s Shaperhood, but behind his courtesy Gyalo sensed a deep reserve. Pure-blood Arsacians regarded themselves as Galea’s original inhabitants and looked down on the peoples of the other kingdoms, who were of a different racial stock; but it seemed to Gyalo that something other than snobbery lay behind Teispas’s remoteness.

Gyalo spent the afternoon before his departure in his small office in the Evening City, taking care of final matters and setting in order the many books and scrolls that littered his desk, so that those who came later to fetch them could more easily return them to their places. Over the past days, driven by the sense that thorough intellectual preparation might offset his lack of practical skills, he had requested from the Brethren’s library every document he could think of that might be relevant to the journey: reports by the liberators of Thuxra City, a history of the Shaper War, several accounts of Shaper apostasy through the ages, a book describing Arsace’s sacred sites--from which he had taken notes, for he intended to visit as many as lay within easy distance of the travel route. Yet the more he read, the more the vistas of his ignorance opened out before him. Now, gathering up the mass of material, he could hardly have felt less prepared.

Finished, he blew out his lamps and went into the workroom, where the cadre of clerks and copyists under his supervision labored at assessing, compiling, and reproducing documents on the refurbishment and re-staffing of Arsacian monasteries and temples. Many had worked for him previously in Rimpang; they did not know the truth of where he was going, but they knew he would be gone for at least a year, and they lined up to say good-bye, offering blessings and good wishes, amulets for luck, and trinkets to leave along the way at the shrines of Jo-mea, the Aspect who watched over travelers. In his unsettled frame of mind, the warmth of their farewells moved him almost to tears. They let him go at last, and he returned to the monastery to join the other Shapers in the ceremony of Banishing conducted nightly in the monastery’s small chapel. Then he exchanged his linen stole for one of silk, and set out for his evening appointment: a meal with Utamnos.

Utamnos’s valet, a Forceless monk almost as aged as Utamnos himself, met Gyalo at the Evening City’s entrance and conducted him to Utamnos’s suite. Utamnos was waiting, sitting on a cushion before a low Chonggyean-style table. Gyalo knelt, crossing his arms before his face.

“Great is Ârata. Great is his Way.”

“Go in light, Gyalo. Get up. Seat yourself. Are you hungry? I hope so. I’ve planned a rather special meal.”

Gyalo settled himself opposite his master. The residences of the Brethren had been among the first spaces in Baushpar to be restored; this room was so pristine that it looked not centuries old but nearly new. The plaster walls, tinted a deep shade of coral, were muraled to half their height with a stylized design of birds and reeds. Warmth came from several large braziers set on either side of the room, and light from candles in paper cages, resting on their own reflections in the gleaming floorboards. There were no rugs, and little furniture beyond the table at which Gyalo and Utamnos sat. On a pedestal in one corner a slender ash-fired vase held a sheaf of poppies.

According to Âratist belief, the world had been created by Ârata out of his own bright nature, and so was good. The pleasures of the world, therefore, were also good, and it was proper to embrace them. Though vowed Âratists swore an oath of celibacy, they lived without restraint in other ways--especially the Brethren, each of whom possessed a vast personal treasury amassed over the long period of their rebirths. But while some set great store by outward show, others were far more moderate. Utamnos denied himself nothing he truly desired, yet the whole of his residence reflected the exquisite restraint that defined this room.

Utamnos’s valet brought in the meal, which was as fine as Utamnos had promised. They talked of inconsequential things: the coolness of the summer, the progress of Baushpar’s refurbishment, the disagreements between the city’s secular administration, which believed the church should contribute to the rehabilitation of businesses and private residences, and the Brethren, who wanted the secular population to donate labor for the repair of public works. A candle enclosed in a paper globe sat on the table between them, glowing like tiny moon.

At last Gyalo pushed away his bowl. “I can’t remember when I’ve had a better meal. Thank you, Old One.”

Utamnos smiled. The honorific fit him, for he was ancient indeed, his face deeply creased, his eyebrows white. In this incarnation he was Arsacian, small in stature and slender as most Arsacians were, so dark of skin that his faded sun tattoo barely showed. He wore the cream-colored stole of the Forceless, as did all the Brethren, for the First Messenger and his offspring had not possessed shaping or dreaming ability. Among the Sons and Daughters, only he owned memories of Baushpar in his own body; he had been just four years old when the Caryaxists came. He had wept, on his return, to see Baushpar’s defilement. With his own hands he had worked to scrub graffiti from the walls and sweep debris from the neglected courtyards.

"It was my pleasure. I wanted to make a good memory for you while you are traveling."

“It will be, Old One.”

“You’ve explained everything to Tenzen?”

“I spent all the morning with him.” Tenzen was another of Utamnos’s aides, and would handle Gyalo’s duties in his absence. “Everything’s arranged, Old One. You’ll barely notice I’m gone.”

“Oh, I will notice. You are my Third Hand. You know that.”

“Yes.” Gyalo dropped his eyes, fixing them on the little candle-moon. “I know that.”

“I was the one who recommended you for this expedition. Did the Bearer tell you that?”

“No, Old One. But I guessed it. There must be other capable Shapers with administrative experience and knowledge of the repatriation effort, and even some of the learning I possess, who also have experience of the world, of travel and so on. The only reason I can imagine I was chosen was because you spoke for me.”

“Very true. And do you know why I spoke for you?”

“I assume you believe me capable of the duties I’ve been given, Old One.”

“You’re one of the finest aides I have ever had, Gyalo. Accomplished, intelligent, completely trustworthy. But those qualities, excellent as they are, are not what I value most in you. There is something else, something I’ve not encountered often in my lives. You have a clean faith. There is no shadow in it, no stain of doubt or ambition or hypocrisy. You see Ârata as he is, in all his power and all his distance. You do not need to deceive yourself in order to believe--you don’t need to force the god into a smaller shape, a selfish shape, as those who worship the Aspects do.”

“No, Old One. I’ve never needed that.”

“That purity, that...honesty, makes you strong.” Utamnos’s eyes, amber-brown and webbed in wrinkles, were intent on Gyalo’s face. “Strong in your soul. Strong in a way that the power of the body, the breadth of experience you believe you lack, cannot match. That is the strength you’ll need, in the Burning Land. When you find these people, there will certainly be Shapers among them.”

“You say ‘when’, Old One. I was told it wasn’t certain there were survivors.”

“Oh, there are survivors. I’ve never believed that what the Dreamers have been sensing all these years is natural; why then would they not be able to see it clearly? No. There’s some agency at work. Perhaps whoever is there does not wish to be found.”

Gyalo shook his head, disturbed. “But who could hide from Dreamers?”

“Perhaps you’ll be the one to learn. As for the Shapers--by logic it must be so.”

“I’d thought of that, Old One. We learned from the Caryaxists that there is sustenance in the Land, but the banished Âratists didn’t know that. If they did survive, they could only have done so by use of shaping.”

“Precisely. Now, not all my Brothers and Sisters wish to follow this logic. Even those who concede the probability of Shapers assume they will be weak, for it has been well established that the ability fades if training is not precise. But these exiles were vowed Âratists. Isn’t it at least as likely that they remembered their training and passed it on intact? To me it seems entirely possible that what you will find in the Burning Land is not just a community that includes unbound Shapers, but unbound Shapers at full strength. It will not be easy for you to experience that, Shaper that you are--or to witness what will have to be done.”

“I’ve known from the start it was a possibility.” The release of shaping from the tether of manita created a consuming addiction to the ability, almost a kind of madness, from which sprang all manner of corruption: greed, cruelty, a lust for more and ever more power. Shapers who tasted this addiction could never again be trusted; captured apostates were rendered powerless by means of massive doses of manita given under supervision--in effect, a lifetime sentence of arrest. Discovered apostates usually fought savagely to escape that fate. This was the true purpose of the expedition’s military contingent--to provide the force that would be necessary, should there be Shapers in the Burning Land. “I’m prepared.”

“No.” Utamnos shook his head. “You cannot be prepared, Gyalo. Oh, in one sense you’ll be ready enough--my Brothers and Sisters are wise enough to equip for all eventualities, whether they believe in them or not. But in other ways....If I am right, you will encounter apostasy of a kind that has not been seen since just after the Shaper War. You’ve studied the accounts, you know all about the corruptions and the abuses...but you cannot possibly know what it will be like to confront such things until you come face to face with them. It will be all the harder for you because of your own strong ability, and the possibility of temptation that holds for you. And yet it is precisely for this reason that I trust you above any Shaper I know. It’s because you see the danger in yourself, and know so clearly the ways in which you might fall, that you grasp so acutely the danger falling poses. It’s because you’ve explored beyond the boundaries that you know so well why the boundaries are there. The Bearer found this difficult to accept, at first. But I was able to persuade him that a strong, committed, experienced Shaper was a better choice than a weaker one with a less subtle understanding of the ability.”

Gyalo thought of the questions the Bearer had asked him. Shapers were Âratism’s priests, its elite. More educated than other vowed Âratists, more accomplished, they held most positions of authority within the church, and provided much of its administration, from the running of monasteries and nunneries and hospitals and orphanages to the recording of Âratist history and the service of the Brethren. Gyalo had never greatly cared for these trappings of status--it was shaping itself he loved, not just the manipulation of form and matter he performed in ceremony, but the way the world appeared to him when he called forth his ability. Shaping lay in his soul like Ârata’s images within the cores of his temples--walled round with training and the restraints of manita, a mighty sleeping thing at the foundation of all he was and all he did, whose dreams, in the form of the rituals he conducted, touched and transformed the very fabric of reality. To shape was to see as Ârata had seen, when he called the world to being. It was to exercise, in miniature, Ârata’s own creative power. It was, briefly, to return the god to active life within the world. Of all men and women on earth, only a Shaper could do these things.

Gyalo was aware that his ability was dangerous--not because of his childish experimentation, which was not so very different from others’, but because it was so strong. It had come upon him early, and with unusual violence--a sudden access of visions and hallucinations that swallowed him whole for days, while the manita masters struggled to find the dosage that would properly tether him. It was a delicate balance, requiring that shaping be bound into latency yet remain accessible to the trained will. Most Shapers needed frequent adjustment at first; Gyalo had needed more than most, and from the start his tether had been larger. By the time he turned fifteen his dosage had leveled out, but small increases had still been necessary well past the time of his Shaper ordination, at the age of twenty-five.

And yet he understood that what Utamnos had said was true. The difficulty of his shaping talent, the struggle he had had to wage to master it and himself, made him stronger than those who had not needed to fight so hard. In spite of himself, he still dreaded the physical perils he would go out the next day to confront. But spiritual danger he did not fear.

“He asked me about that, Old One,” he said. “About apostasy. Whether I’d ever been tempted.”

“And of course you answered honestly.”

“I told him what I told you, when I first began to work for you.”

“He liked you, you know.” Utamnos smiled, his dark face creasing. “He told me so.”

“I’m honored, Old One.”

“You are also lucky. He can be capricious in his judgments. If he’d taken a dislike to you, nothing I could have said would have persuaded him to send you.”

There was an edge to Utamnos’s voice. He did not often allow himself to be so unguarded; but Gyalo knew, as few beyond the Brethren’s immediate circle did, that there was conflict between Utamnos and the Bearer. Though the souls of the Brethren were infallibly reborn, their characters in any given incarnation were much affected by their physical forms, and they often found themselves at odds, like members of a large family whose loyalty is beyond question but whose personalities rub one another raw. In his present body, the Bearer was much concerned with politics; it was part of his dream of post-Caryaxist reconstruction that the Brethren take a place in the Lords’ Assembly, gaining the church, for the first time in Arsacian history, a political as well as a religious voice. Many of the Brethren supported this--but some, Utamnos among them, believed that the church had no business with affairs of state. Utamnos was the eldest of the Brethren, not just in his present body but in the original order of the First Messenger’s children, and when he objected to a course of action the Bearer was obliged to listen, and, often, to obey. But in this Utamnos had not been able to sway his spirit-sibling.

“I have a gift for you.” Utamnos reached beneath the cushion on which he sat and brought out a package folded into patterned paper. “To keep you company on your long journey.”

Gyalo unwrapped the little bundle. It was a book, bound between covers of yellow horn: Dream Songs, by the eighth-century devotional poet Tsantse Jo Dokha. The stanzas were written out on fine creamy paper in the original Chonggyean. Gyalo ran his fingers lightly along the lines of brushstroked characters, so different from the flowing cursive of Arsacian script. They had been his first learning, and were still his favorite to read.

“It’s an exquisite gift, Old One. Thank you.”

“I’ll think of you, Gyalo.” Utamnos’s expression softened. “Under the sun, upon the sands. See that you take care. See that you come back to me.”

Gyalo felt his throat tighten. He lowered his head, and occupied himself with slipping the book into his pocket.

There was the sound of an opening door. A small dark-haired boy came trotting toward them.

“Look who is here!” said Utamnos, turning. “What are you doing out of bed, my bright boy?”

“I had a dream,” the child whimpered.

“Oh, a dream! Come, let me make it better.”

Utamnos held out his arms. The boy ran to him. Gyalo saw the involuntary grimace as Utamnos caught him up, and thought, as he often did these days, that his master was growing very frail.

“There, there, my sun-child, my treasure,” Utamnos murmured, stroking the boy’s curly black hair. “What did you dream that was so terrible you couldn’t stay in bed?”

The boy shook his head, burrowing into Utamnos’s embrace. All the Brethren were precious, but this little boy was especially so, for he was Arsacian. For the past eighty years, Sons and Daughters born into Arsace had gone unfound; by the end of the Caryaxist tyranny, the number of recognized Brethren had dwindled from thirty-five to twenty-two. Most of the lost Brethren could not be recovered until their next rebirth--it was possible for them to recognize what they were, and to access the store of their reborn wisdom, only if training began when they were very young. But two Sons had died within the past six years and had not been replaced, and it had been hoped their reincarnations might still be found within Arsace. This child was the first: Ivaxri, eighteenth of the Messenger’s thirty sons.

“It is late,” said Utamnos. “I should get him back to bed. Let me give you my blessing.”

Gyalo rose and went to kneel at his master’s side. Utamnos’s hand came to rest gently on his head--not a weight, as the Bearer’s had been, but a caress. Gyalo felt emotion rise in him again--love for this old man, who had recognized and indulged his hunger for learning, who had freely forgiven his youthful sins, who had treated him not as a servant but almost as a son. Would Utamnos still be here, in this form, when Gyalo returned? It was pointless to feel sorrow at a Son’s or Daughter’s physical passing; yet so much of Gyalo’s love for his master was bound up with the ancient shape Utamnos now wore. It would be impossible not to grieve.

“Go in light, child of Ârata, vowed servant of the god,” Utamnos said softly. “May hardship overlook you. May pain forget you. May you endure gladly, and return safely. Go in light, my helper, my friend, my Third Hand.”

His grip withdrew. Gyalo looked up, into his master’s face--and into the face of Ivaxri, who had lifted his head from Utamnos’s chest. The boy’s expression was grave, his eyes intent; it was not the gaze of a child at all, but the detached, fathomless regard of a soul so old there was nothing it had not seen, peering out from behind a mask of childish flesh. Gyalo felt a coldness run along his spine. He did not often confront such a stare, for the older Brethren sought to spare those who served them, and the younger soon learned to do so. But now he saw, fully present in Ivaxri’s wide unblinking eyes, the whole cold otherness of the Âratist leaders, their incomprehensible unlikeness to ordinary beings.

Ivaxri reached out one small hand, and set the tip of his index finger on Gyalo’s forehead. “Go in light,” he said, with his baby tongue that could not yet properly form the words. Then he burrowed into Utamnos’s stole again.

Gyalo got to his feet. “Go in light, Old One.”

“Great is Ârata. Great is his Way.” Utamnos smiled. In his eyes there was only warmth. “Travel well, Gyalo.”

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