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been discovered. He remembered it. The cold table. The agony of loss. Coming back for the first time . . .
    Too much metal. Even still, he remembered that day because of its metal surfaces, reflecting his face . . . and his tears.
    Regardless, the first Deathless had been created near that time, and not before. Of this he was reasonably certain. The ancient gods of before his time could not have been Deathless.
    But knowing that did not stop him from wondering anyway.
    A tall figure darkened the doorway. Raidriar turned, bringing his stolen sword to the side as the newcomer entered. It was a daeril with hauntingly hollow features and a skeletal ribcage that protruded from its skin. It did not attack immediately, but made the sign of an offered challenge.
    Raidriar smiled. His Devoted, so civilized, had shown less honor than this brute. The Worker and Devoted alike undoubtedly hoped the daerils would ignore such protocols, but this thing had been created by Raidriar himself. It was better than that.
    “It will be an honor to slay you,” Raidriar said, pointing his sword at the creature. “I do enjoy inspecting my handiwork now and then.”
    He stepped into the proper stance, and the contest began.

CHAPTER
SIX
    SIRIS RODE in silence.
    His horse’s hooves beat a familiar thumping rhythm on the packed earth. A . . . horse. His imprisonment had only been two years. This should not feel so strange for him.
    Two years and two thousand lives—many of them very short, a few days at most, a few moments at least. He felt those lives all heaped upon him, like dirt upon a newly buried corpse.
    Was he supposed to just move on? Forget the pain, the isolation, the anger? If he had just been Siris, he could almost have done it. But the man he had become in that prison, the Dark Self, was not something so easily forgotten.
    “I see you managed to grow more facial hair,” Isa said, riding beside him. “Looks itchy. I’ve always wondered—how do you stuff a beard like that inside a helm? Doesn’t it stick out the breathing holes?”
    Siris grunted. They rode through dusty scrubland, broken here and then by plateaus and foothills, with distant mountains behind. He remembered passing through this empty place on his way to the Vault of Tears. It seemed like forever ago.
    Isa turned their course along the rim of a large plateau. “Typically,” she said, “it is customary for someone who has been rescued in a dramatic way—such as you just were—to fawn over their rescuer. Joyous exultation and all that.”
    Siris rode in silence.
    “I can say your part, if you want,” Isa suggested.
    He shrugged.
    “Very well. ‘Gee golly, thanks for saving me, Isa. I sure am happy you done did that.’”
    “‘Done did’?” Siris asked, looking up. “‘ Gee golly ’?”
    “Well, I’m not terribly good at accents in your stupid language, but you’re a farmer boy, aren’t you?”
    “No. You know what I am.”
    “I do—you’re a hero.”
    “That’s not what you said when you first found out I was Deathless.”
    “I will admit,” Isa said, “I was surprised.”
    “Surprised? You were outraged. Betrayed.” He looked away from her, scanning the hilly scrubland. “I understand. I felt the same way.”
    “You are a hero, Whiskers,” she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince them both. “At least, that’s how you’re going to act—because that’s what I’ve made of you.”
    He looked at her, frowning. She simply smiled, and then guided her horse into a small canyon.
    Siris followed, joining her when she eventually dismounted and stepped up to the far wall of the canyon. She pulled back some scrub brush, revealing a small cavern mouth—a tunnel into the rock. Together, they pulled the dead brush away, making a hole wide enough to bring the horses through.
    The inside of the cavern reminded him of growing up in the hills outside a city that had been built within an enormous cavern. This was much