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ahead, where fort soldiers were collecting spears beneath the tower. Waving Cumalo to follow, he crouched outside, beside the painted walls. “Stand there, will you?” Demane pointed him into place. The two of them hailed from the same remote spur of the continent, and in these parts that made them countrymen. After the native fashion, Cumalo dressed in a voluminous black robe: perfectly suited to blocking the view of passersby.
    Demane opened his bag. He stuck his seven-foot spear down into it.
    “Hey, as long as you’ve got that bad boy open . . . ,” Cumalo said. “Do you care if I hold a couple pennies for you, at least ’til we get to Olorum?”
    Demane dug out a careless pinch of savings. He stood and handed the coins over uncounted.
    “Aw, Sorcerer. This is too much! All I need is—”
    “Don’t worry about it. Come on.” Demane laid a hand on Cumalo’s back, guiding him back toward the gates. There was a hard talk about gambling in the offing. Cumalo had never made bride-price, and so his lady up north in Philipiya still lived with her parents: two big boys, one baby girl, and twelve long years into an uneasy approximation of marriage. An ugly possibility troubled Demane’s mind. Could a good friend, your homeboy, also be a shiftless, trifling ne’er-do-well? 1 He looked up at the painted wall.
    A hero and his second, beset on all sides by a multinational host, were putting down the enemy with extreme prejudice. No man Demane had met was his match for strength, but the one painted centermost might surpass him in girth and brawn, if true to life. The hero’s right arm bulked with muscle still within human bounds. But that left arm was superhuman, and would have massed as thick as Demane’s thigh. It was the left hand, too, that gripped a rock-hewn axe depicted midstroke, dashing open fully half the front rank of foemen’s skulls. Five heads were as many eggs of bone, blood, brains bursting behind the sweep of the spiked stone that crowned the hero’s weapon. Five more crouched in a desperate scrum, transfixed before the fall of the meteor toward
their
heads. Beside the hero, his second lay about him with a Daluçan knife—a “sword”—scything the close-ranked enemy as might a farmer his corn. Scattered fingers, another hand still on its forearm, a head cloven crosswise, the crown of another with the cranial bowl dumping its jellies: these and other fruits of the flesh tumbled pell-mell in a grisly harvest. Neither the expression nor appearance of the hero’s second was marked out in particular detail, save for the coloring of his warrior braids. Those paints glistened as bright as agate or lapis lazuli.
    “It’s showing the battle of Sweet Wells Station,” Cumalo said.
    Demane asked, “Who’s he?”
    “Big one’s the Lion of Olorum. Generalissimo and the prince the old King chose to rule after him. But a two-headed mamba bit him and he died. The one with the long knife is—
was
—his right hand. The Lion loved his women and left twentysome wives, twice as many children; but those two, well, they say . . .” Cumalo looked at Demane askance, and, thinking again, said only, “That blue hair is really something, huh?”
    Demane shrugged.
    Through the gates was a view down the Mainway, to the bustle on the piazza at the Station’s center and farther, to the glimmer of Mother of Waters. Folk and beasts glutted the Mainway’s length with all the noise and stench to be expected in-town.
    Under-tower, a dozen fort soldiers mingled with the brothers. The fo-so handed out reclamation chits, collecting spears. They wore black robes, strung-bead commemorials of past actions; the youngbloods’ hair was plaited in looping designs, the oldheads in simple cornrows. The fo-so were all unmixed Olorumi, and therefore beardless as babies; their right cheeks smooth, the others finely mutilated. Insignia of a thornwasp, the one-stinger drone, was cut into every left cheek.
    “ . . . vouchsafed none but