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them?—with deadly lilu. Is it true they have the bodies of women and the skin of snakes?”
    â€œOh. Eh. Some of them.”
    â€œWhew!” The captain grinned. “I wish I had your cool. Having seen such sights as you have, and survived such dangers! My thanks to you, truly, for being generous enough to dine and drink with me. You being such an important man in your part of the world.”
    â€œYes. Eh. And my thanks to you, Captain, for sharing your food and drink. You’ve shown me hospitality. I won’t forget it.”
    The awkward parting accomplished, Kesh took his leave.
    In the morning, he rose to find Captain Sharahosh in command with a new troop of Sirniakan cavalry. Captain Jushahosh and his troop were gone. The Qin company remained.
    Captain Sharahosh was an older man uninterested in conversation, and he held his soldiers aloof from prisoners andQin alike. They rode for another day, following a road so wide that four wagons might roll abreast. Fields, vineyards, and orchards crowded the landscape, no scrap of land unmarked by human industry. The next morning a vast wall rose out of the earth. They entered a city through gates sheeted with brass and rode down an avenue bounded by high walls. At intervals, bridges crossed over the avenue, but Kesh never ascertained any traffic above, although he heard and smelled the sounds of men out and about in the streets beyond the walls. The rounded dome of the city’s temple grew larger as they rode into the heart of the city.
    The sun rose to its zenith before they reached a second gate, which opened into a courtyard lined with a colonnade, pillars hewn out of rose granite. The structure resembled in every detail the palace court in Sarida where he and Eliar had first been taken into custody. There was even a farther gate into a farther courtyard, spanned by an archway carved with reliefs celebrating the reign of the emperor: the officers of the court approaching an empty throne, the sun and moon and stars in attendance on the crown of glory that represented the suzerainty of Beltak. The temple dome could be glimpsed to the right, the sun glinting off its bronze skin. Maybe it was the same in every cursed Sirniakan city, the palace supported by the temple and the temple supported by the palace, one unable to exist without the architecture of the other.
    â€œSit here,” said Captain Sharahosh, perhaps the tenth and eleventh words he had spoken to them in their days together. He dismissed his soldiers but left the Qin riders waiting in the hot sun in the dusty courtyard as he vanished beyond a more humble gate.
    In the Hundred, of course, the temples of the seven gods were the pillars that supported the land, and the tales wove the land into a single cloth. Or so the priests of the seven gods would say. And they had to say so. They had to believe, just as the priests of Beltak had to believe. What were they, after all, if the gods meant nothing?
    Kesh had all along prayed at dawn and at night with the empire men while Eliar and the Qin soldiers had stood aside insilence. But he did not believe, and Beltak did not strike him down, and the priest accompanying the soldiers did not see into his heart and know he was lying.
    â€œDo you think they will kill us now?” Eliar muttered.
    â€œThey could have killed us before, if they meant to kill us. Anyway, we are simply merchants, traveled to Sarida to turn a profit.”
    Eliar wiped sweat from his forehead. “You’re right.”
    â€œRight about what?”
    â€œDon’t you recall what you said when we were waiting in the courtyard in Sarida? It looked exactly like this one, didn’t it?”
    Would the cursed man never stop chattering about his own gods-rotted fears?
    â€œYou said people will renounce the truth if it will give them an advantage to do so. And then they convince themselves that what they wish to be true is the truth.” He twisted his silver