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beyond that encounter on the road, which was nothing to be boasted of although they had pickled the heads of the woman and the child in a barrel of wine so the new exalted administrator of the women’s palace could make an accounting of whowas dead and who, therefore, missing. He never tired of hearing Keshad’s tales of his travels. It seemed never to occur to the captain that a man could embroider a small tale and turn it into a large one. Kesh found him lacking in imagination.
    At night, in the privacy of their tent, Kesh forced Eliar to go over and over the basic tale of their partnership, their trade, their expedition south. “So they can’t catch us out in contradictions and decide to burn us.”
    “Maybe I’d be better dead,” whispered Eliar.
    “Maybe so, but I wouldn’t. I intend to survive this interview, give a good account of myself, and go home with a decent profit.”
    “Yet if we fail—eiya!—when I close my eyes I see that poor little child with his head sliced off. And that woman—his poor mother—cut down like a beast. Doesn’t it haunt you, Kesh? Are you so unfeeling?”
    “Yes, I am. There’s nothing I can do for them. They’re dead. I concern myself with the living.”
    The living—like Eliar’s sister. The woman he could never discuss, whose face he ought never to have seen. That face—her glance—haunted his nights and his days.
    They rode ten days after the skirmish on a road marked at intervals with distance markers, just as in the Hundred, only the empire measured not in meys but in a measure known as a cali, about half the distance of a mey. Kesh was careful to count off their distance, and every night he had Eliar record the cali traveled in the accounts book Eliar had brought.
    “It’s a good thing you’re useful for something,” Kesh said, watching the young Silver slash marks by lamplight. “Did you make note of the two crossroads we passed and at what distance we reached them?”
    “Do you think I’m a fool?”
    Kesh did not answer.
    “Yes, you do. I did note them. I noted the letters marking the posts. They indicate which towns and cities lie along that road. I also recorded the number and density of villages we passed today, and the water wheels and forges that I could be sure of. All in a script which no one but the Ri Amarah can read, so wecan’t be caught out if my book is taken from me. Unless, of course, the act of writing in a book is seen as suspicious, which I must suppose it will be.”
    “What are those?” Kesh asked, pointing to a secondary column of odd squiggles falling on the left-hand side of the page.
    “I’m recording the words and sounds of the Sirniakan language. Why do you think I talk so much with the officers? They’re not particularly interesting. We have in our archives a record of the language from our time of exile here, but we no longer know how to pronounce things properly and what certain words truly mean. That’s what you don’t understand, Kesh. All you can think about is how much coin you’ll get from this expedition. If we survive it, which I doubt. But there are more valuable things than coin. There is knowledge.”
    “Information to be sold—”
    “No. Knowledge in itself—Why do I bother?” He broke off and cleaned the brush and without speaking another word boxed his writing tools and lay down on his blankets with his back to Kesh.
    Kesh wondered what would happen if he grasped the cloth of Eliar’s turban and ripped the coiled cloth from his head. His hands twitched. With a laugh, he crawled out and paced to the central watch fire, where he found Captain Jushahosh still awake and conferring with an officer in a red jacket holding a fancy stick like a reeve’s baton, plated as in gold.
    The captain looked up sharply at Kesh’s approach, and without interrupting his flow of words to the other man, lifted his left hand and gestured with a flick of the fingers that seemed to say
go away
. Kesh stepped back, then