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understand, to accumulate knowledge. He’d even arranged for her to leave the temple complex on several occasions, to accompany some of the lay workers when they went to buy provisions or other goods.
    Unlike her sisters, she knew what money was for, and how to count it. The novice had watched the townspeople at work and at play, had witnessed staggering drunks and rowdy fights between street urchins, seen lovers holding hands and embracing …
    Of course, Thia had averted her eyes quickly from such sights. She was a Sacred Vessel, soon to take her final vows.
    Such carnal pleasures were not for her.
    Thia would not even allow herself to recall the dreams that had come to her after seeing those lovers. Dreams where Master Varn touched her face, her hand, even, once, her breasts …
    Realizing where her memories had led her, the novice blushed violently. What is wrong with you? Be careful, or you’ll make a mistake! Do you want to wind up Chosen?
    Memories of the daily sacrifice performed before dawn each morning to ensure that the Sun would rise made the novice shiver, her chest suddenly tight. To have a huge hole punched into one’s breast, so that the entire living heart could be removed …
    But she knew it was necessary. Boq’urain needed the Sun for the crops to flourish and the people to thrive, but …
    But sometimes the Chosen would remain conscious for a long minute as they beheld their own dripping, pumping hearts. Usually they lost consciousness and died quickly, but not always. Thia had learned to look at their hearts, rather than their faces, since it was a transgression to look elsewhere than at the High Priests and their victims.
    All of the scrolls were now safely stowed. Thia closed the cabinets, slid the bolts into place, and activated the locking bars with urgent haste. Seconds ticked by in the novice’s head as she extinguished the candle and darted out the door, carefully closing and locking it behind her. Then, holding the skirt of her gray habit high, she began to run.
    The corridors around her were whitewashed, nearly fea-tureless, and spotlessly clean due to the ministrations of the acolytes and postulants. Thia’s bare feet pattered against chill stone as she ran, but she was used to it and never noticed the cold hardness. Verang was a city built in the mountains, surrounded by peaks on three sides … even the summers were chilly. Winters could be deadly for the unprotected.
    Swish-slap, swish-slap … the sound of her feet striking stone warred with the pounding of her heart. She rounded a corner, darted down a flight of stairs so timeworn that a faint depression hollowed the center of each step.
    Down … down. Around another corner. So far she had not met another soul, and that was a bad sign. That meant the community was gathering in the eastern ziggurat, where the refectory was located. Acolytes and lay priests and priestesses would be moving among the rows of tables and benches, handing out bowls of barley-lamb soup and thick chunks of bread for sopping up the broth. Thia had not eaten since the noon repast, six hours ago; her stomach rumbled loudly at the thought of food.
    She hesitated but a bare instant at the tapestry near the end of an otherwise bare corridor, then lifted it and slid through the door beyond into darkness. Fumbling with her cold fingers, she lit her tiny travel-candle, shielded from drafts in its protective cylinder of metal.
    No time to run down the ten tiers of steps that led down from the western pyramid, cross the cobbled courtyard, and then up the ten tiers to the eastern ziggurat. Instead she would take the secret way, the way Master Varn had first shown her all those years ago. It was forbidden—but taking it would save her so much time that it was worth the risk.
    The corridor here was more like a tunnel; the blocks of gray granite were bare of whitewash. The novice kilted her habit up into the knotted scarlet scourge that served as her belt and set off