The Sun's Devices

Book 0: The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Book 3 of the outstanding The Hollow Gods series In the aftermath of the shattering of Mirror Town, Krish has taken has rightful place as heir to the kingdom of Ashanesland, with his friends and allies ruling by his side. He's turned his back on his divine birthright and set out to bring unity to the warring tribes and nations as no more than a man. The mysterious land once known as the Eternal Empire has opened its borders at last, and invited Krish to take his place as part of its ruling Triumvirate. But there are plots within plots in the country that once worshipped his sister, the sun, and now hates all gods. Because the sun goddess been made flesh once again and is determined to end the ancient conflict with her brother's final defeat. And there are strange and new gods stirring in the lands - while some search for a weapon that could destroy them all.

Release date: October 8, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 480

Sample

Yetunde rose with the dawn on the day he didn’t die. His window stood open and the rising sun shone so bright he closed his eyes, blinking away his tears. His mistress had two faces, and only one could be looked on without pain.

His bed was soft, but his back still ached when he left it. The physicians said that something was broken inside him, and they frowned and looked away when he asked how long. He washed himself in the gold-rimmed basin and slipped into his silk robes. He hadn’t been born to such luxury. Before She came his family had been miners, but his talent for the runes had bought him all this silver and gold, all the silks. All these things he would lose when he was gone, and his beloved Emilohi along with them.

Mizhara’s chambers were near to his, as they had been in all the years since She came to them, the little golden-eyed girl whose birth had changed the world. He and his fellow priests had been all she had back then, parents and friends and siblings all in one, but now there were others. Her Servants waited outside her chambers, skin and hair glowing bright. The one called Bachur stood to attention before her door. He thought she meant to block his way, but she smiled and stood aside.

‘She is waiting for you,’ Bachur said.

Mizhara sat on the stool by her window, gazing out on the city into which she so seldom ventured. She ruled from a distance and through her priests. Unlike his, the room in which she spent so much of her time was plain. She might have had all the gold and jewels she wanted, but she preferred polished wood and sharp-angled metal, each object around her purely practical.

‘How goes my land?’ she asked him.

‘All is well.’ His words caught in his throat and he doubled over, coughing.

‘All is not well with you.’ Her face was very like a person’s, only her eyes to mark her out. But as she studied him, he thought that she was more strange by far than her golden-skinned, sharp-eared Servants.

‘I’ve lived seventy years,’ he said. ‘Long enough to see you grow into a woman. But all things must end.’

‘Must they?’ She frowned down at her city, its hectic streets reduced to order by distance. ‘What does my coming mean, if not an end to endings?’

‘Well, perhaps you are right. Only time can reveal it.’

Such an answer had silenced her before, but now she glided towards him, tread light on the marble floor. ‘I have been studying the runes.’

‘There’s no need to trouble yourself. Your existence is sufficient.’

‘Sufficient for whom?’

For us, he thought. For your priests, who use the runes in your name. But that was a truth it was best not to speak.

‘I have been studying the runes, and I believe I understand them.’ She smiled. He knew that there was no better smile in the world. The worship he felt for her in that moment was so profound it could consume him entirely, until he was nothing but love for her. He held on to the feeling, making sure to remember it. Without it, the runes would not answer him.

‘I can have instructors sent—’ he began.

She held up one finger to silence him. ‘The runes are mine. I understand them better than any instructor. You mages hold them in your minds. That is well, but there is a better way. I believe they can be put out in the world, made permanent and strong.’

‘Engraved? No, my dearest, we considered this but never found a way. When the rune faded from the mind its power faded from the object on which it had been carved.’

‘Because you chose the wrong runes. The permanence must be written into them.’

They’d tried that too, but he saw that there was no way he would persuade her. Better to let her try and fail, and then maybe she would leave the runes to those who understood them.

‘You do not believe me.’ Her expression was jarringly adult. It reminded him that she was no longer the child he’d helped to raise. If she’d been an ordinary woman, she might have had a child of her own by now. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong, Yetunde. We will see.’ She knelt by the chest at the foot of her bed and pulled a golden sphere of metal from it.

There were runes scribed all across the sphere’s surface: markings he didn’t recognise and whose meaning he couldn’t puzzle out. The glyphs of being and becoming were twisted together in complex, unfathomable ways. ‘You asked for gold to make jewellery,’ he said.

‘I asked for gold to make something beautiful,’ she corrected, ‘and this is it. Here – take it.’

For a moment it felt just what it appeared: cool and smooth, warming as he held it. But slowly the warmth grew, hot and hotter until he couldn’t bear to hold it. He cried out but found he couldn’t let go. It had fused to him, no longer metal but flesh growing into flesh. As the pain grew, something came from it, burrowing through his skin and wriggling up his veins, flowing into every part of him. He tried to scream but all that emerged was a hoarse croak.

She took his hands in a gentle grip. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know that it would hurt.’

Hurt was too small a word for this agony. He fell to his knees, barely feeling the impact amidst the greater cacophony of pain. Then he felt it all rushing back again, soothing what it had burned until all sensation was gone, sucked back into the golden sphere. His fingers loosened at last and he dropped it to the floor, shuddering.

‘What did you do to me?’ he whispered. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘I wanted to fix you.’ She pulled him to his feet with inhuman strength. Her golden eyes studied him; they seemed to look through him. ‘I’ve mended what was broken inside you.’

The hope blossomed in him, its own sort of pain. ‘My illness?’

‘Gone.’

He turned his attention inward, focusing his mind on his joints, the internal processes that others couldn’t feel but mages had learned to heed. The growth was gone; the tumour that no rune he’d summoned could touch had melted away and left only healthy flesh behind.

‘That shouldn’t be possible!’ he said.

‘For you, perhaps. But my power is the greater whole of which yours is only a fragment. The sphere’s merely a beginning. I’ll make another one, a much more powerful one, and set it at the centre of the city. No one will have to suffer or die before their time. I will bring life and happiness to my people.’

Her people. It was the first time he’d ever heard her call them that.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘There’s more I’ve been working on.’ She strode towards the door and he strode after, his body moving with an ease and fluidity he thought had been lost to it for ever.

*

Emilohi sat in the prow of the barge as it floated towards the eastern gateway of the Garden. She alighted before they reached it and waved to the bargemaster. He signalled his men to pole backwards, away from the sacred ground. None but Yron’s priests were permitted to enter here.

She’d pretended reluctance when she parted from Yetunde two days past. In truth, the parting did pain her. He was so frail now, his remaining days so few. But in his absence she could remember the man she’d married. When she looked at his ravaged body, all she could see was the day very soon when he’d be gone.

It was hard to think of such things in Yron’s Garden. As familiar as it was to her, as many times as she’d been here, she returned each time a stranger. The path she walked between drooping willows had once led to a rose garden, but now it ended at a small lake scattered with clumps of lily and crowded with violet-bloomed reeds. Music drifted over it and she knew that she’d find Yron beyond.

It took another hour. The route wasn’t straight; no route through this garden was. She passed statues of beasts that had never been, a sundial that told the time in a distant land and a maze whose prickly walls swayed forward to entrap her as she passed. By the time she emerged into the broad field on the far side of the lake, she was sweating and displeased.

Yron stood at the centre of a crowd of his Servants, their ash-grey skin very different from his healthy black, but their eyes the same moon-silver. They all turned to her as she approached, unblinking. She might have found it threatening, but she remembered when each of them had been born. She’d dripped blood into their greedy toddler mouths and wiped their noses. She’d comforted them when they cried for the parents who’d given them up when they saw what their children were.

‘You came!’ Yron sounded surprised, as if she’d ever have ignored his summons.

‘You said it was urgent.’

‘Did I?’ He grinned, his expression hovering between wicked and innocent as it so frequently did. ‘Well, I found myself desiring your company – craving it – and what could be more urgent than that? Come, I’ve something to show you.’

When she was with Yetunde, standing beside his failing body, her sixty-five years seemed like nothing at all. Beside Yron’s youthful exuberance she felt old.

His hand beneath hers was like any man’s: warm and soft. He cupped her elbow and supported her as they walked to the far side of the field and into the orchard beyond. The boughs of each tree were bent beneath the weight of fruit, far more than was natural.

‘You’ve been experimenting again,’ she said.

He pressed a finger into one of the fruits and the overripe flesh parted, dripping juice down his arm. ‘Yes. I heard that the mountain people were starving. After my sister’s armies—’

‘Your armies too,’ she said firmly.

‘We live in the Eternal Empire of Mizhara, don’t we? Her armies conquered the mountain people, and the war left them no time to plant. I heard there was starvation.’

She wondered who he’d heard it from. Yron’s Garden was a refuge of sorts, an island isolated from the troubles of the world, or so it had been intended. ‘Shipments of grain are being sent,’ she reassured him.

‘But growing their own would be better. I’ve been working on plants that can feast on barren soil. See?’

She followed his pointing finger and saw that the fruitful orchard had its feet in dry, sandy soil. ‘Impressive. But their land is cold. What thrives here won’t grow there.’

‘Oh.’ He looked stricken. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Cold? As cold as last winter here, when the rain fell so much?’

‘Far colder.’

In moments like these he still seemed the child he’d quite recently been. But then he smiled again, wide and challenging, and was far from young. ‘I’ll work on it more. Perhaps I’ll work on changing the weather first. If I can make it as cold here as it is there, I’ll be able to judge things better.’

‘You wouldn’t like the cold. And besides, working the weather is hard and dangerous. Why don’t you leave such concerns to your priests and enjoy your revels without guilt?’ She gestured back to the field, where more of the Servants were congregating. The grass was littered with trays of food and many flagons of drink, and pipes to smoke the purple sorghum of which they were so fond.

‘And will you enjoy our revels with us?’ He laced his fingers through hers as he led her back.

‘Of course, my boy.’

‘Ha! Am I a boy to you still? Let’s see what I can do today to change that.’ The fingers of his free hand rose to trace the lines of her face, the crow’s feet at her eyes and the deeper grooves that framed her mouth.

‘Really!’ she said, laughing, but his expression only grew more serious.

‘Yes, really.’ He bent his head to kiss her.

She thought of telling him she had a husband, but he knew that and he knew her age too. ‘We brought you women and men,’ she said, but he shrugged.

‘I’ve yet to try a priest. And the women and men you sent are only pretty on the outside. Your mind shines.’

After that, he didn’t seem to want to speak and she didn’t have the breath for it. He was a skilful lover, gentle and harsh at the right times. When he pulled at her nipple just the way Yetunde liked to do, she wondered if he’d learned the trick from her husband.

Afterwards they lay side by side in the grass and stared up at the flat blue sky. The moon had risen to sit pale and overawed beside the too-bright sun.

‘Everything I ask for, I’m given,’ he said.

‘We can deny you nothing,’ she agreed.

‘Then bring me people from the mountains. Bring me some of the prisoners – if I speak to them, perhaps I can fathom how to help them.’

*

She and Yetunde met three days later, in their villa by the banks of the Kanad. She already knew what Mizhara had done for him, and she didn’t gasp when she saw his upright back and easy stride and his body unravaged by disease. She only threw her arms around him and squeezed until the tears pushing from behind her eyes retreated.

‘Yron was well?’ her husband asked.

‘He was … enthusiastic. He’s become interested in the fate of the mountain people.’

‘Mizhara concerns herself with our own.’

She sighed and sat beside him on a bench that looked out over the burbling river. ‘He’s been studying the runes.’

‘They both have.’ Yetunde laughed, an unamused sound. ‘No, not studying them. Mastering them. You were right – you were right all along and I should have listened.’ He laughed again, even more harshly. ‘I suppose now at least I have time to try to correct my mistake.’

‘We’re agreed then?’

He nodded, his gaze on the water. ‘We are, but not many of the others will be. This must be done in secret.’

It was a beautiful day, the sky pure and cloudless and the sound of birds all around. ‘They’ll understand soon enough – one day they’ll realise that Yron and Mizhara need to be stopped. And when they come to us for an answer, we’ll have the God Killer ready.’

The borderlands were ugly, uninhabited and unloved. Renar could see that they displeased her male sib. Lanalan’s face wore the frown of a man who’d discovered a fly in his palm wine as he stared at the flat brown landscape from the prow of their canal racer. The canal ran low here, a mere fifty strides above the earth – low and lonely. No other waterways remained this far north. The ruins of a few were visible here and there, piles of crumbling brick half overgrown with the prickly plants that alone seemed to thrive in this nowhere place.

Behind them the canal was a perfect straight line, blue-black against the brown, running to the horizon. A mere five other boats clove the water, sailors straining at their oars. They lumbered low, weighed down by the many knick-knacks and gewgaws her male sib had insisted on bringing with him on this long journey. He would have brought his pets, too, if she hadn’t persuaded him they were sure to perish when exposed to the foreign airs of their destination.

Lanalan disliked the land they travelled through, but it thrilled Renar. She’d ridden the canals often and even sailed on the broad sea on more than one occasion. She’d toured the insectariums of Makat and the windmills of Vien as had many others before her. But this would be a voyage none but she had made in a thousand years.

Their destination lay ahead, a mile or two beyond the termination of the canal. The wall had been built nearly two hundred years ago in the aftermath of the Supad Krik, but it looked untouched by time, its resin bricks glowing orange as the setting sun lit them. It alone was tended in all this wilderness, kept strong and whole as their best defence against the god-sick peoples beyond it.

The end of the canal approached and the rowers slowed their strokes, allowing the boats to drift on the north-flowing current of the water. Ahead the brick walls bulged to form a large pool where the current swirled round to flow south on the left-hand side of the canal. Some hidden mechanism must have lain beneath the water to move it in so convenient a way, but no one had ever dived down to examine it. It was no doubt magic that powered it, a relic of a long-gone era, but what wasn’t seen needn’t be known.

There was a sudden flurry of movement as the sailors rushed to tie their boat to the small dock, leaping across the gap to secure the knots. Their faces were tense as they laughed and talked too loudly, as if to drown out some unwelcome noise, though around them was nothing but silence.

‘Why, we’ve reached our destination,’ Lanalan said, as if this had somehow come as a surprise to him.

A staircase led down from a hatch in the dock, a narrow spiral. Beside it a platform hoisted by ropes and pulleys sat ready to carry cargo. It made its first journey as Renar descended the stairs, which creaked with the rusty sound of long disuse. They looked fragile, the wooden treads riddled with small black wormholes and the bannisters made spongy by centuries of rain and rot.

‘La, are these quite safe?’ Lanalan asked.

‘We’ll soon see, won’t we?’ she told him, which kept him quiet until they’d reached the ground.

Sailors swarmed down after them and began the task of unloading, piling Lanalan’s many boxes and crates in untidy heaps that had her male sib frowning again. ‘A little care with those, I beg of you,’ he said. ‘Each is worth a year of your wages.’

‘Well, that should certainly motivate them,’ Renar said drily.

The very last boat contained their wagon. It was a marvel of construction, specially commissioned by Renar for the journey. She’d known it wouldn’t occur to Lanalan to consider such a thing. She’d had it made in pieces small enough to fit inside the canal racers, yet quick to reassemble. A few of the sailors were doing so now.

They moved slowly at the task. She saw one glance between her and the landscape and smirk. Renar scowled. She understood the problem quite as well as the smirking sailor. There was no road here at the end of civilisation, only a rocky track. The wagon was sturdy and well sprung but it was made for travelling on lacquered ways. Its wheels would be quite incapable of carrying them here.

‘Stop!’ she said. ‘You know as well as I that it will serve no purpose. You’ll have to carry the packs, I’m afraid. We’ll pay you extra, don’t doubt it.’ It would be Lanalan’s coin, naturally.

‘You want us to go there?’ The captain of their little fleet stared at the amber glitter of the wall ahead.

Her male sib smiled that sunny smile of his. ‘Why yes, of course. And beyond, I suppose, until a decent road can be found. I believe they have roads in the god-sick lands, do they not?’

‘Yes,’ Renar said. ‘They have roads. They’re not entirely savage.’

The captain watched his crew place the last of their packages on the pile. It teetered in the shadow of the canal, absurdly large for just two travellers. ‘To the end of the water and no further. That was the job. We’ve done it.’

Lanalan’s smile remained as carefree as ever. He didn’t believe himself a man who could be refused. ‘I’ll pay more, we’ve already said. Why, I’ll pay you and your crews the full fee for the voyage all over again, and it’s just a short walk. You’ll have the cubes in your purses within the hour.’

The captain looked at his crew, his eyes measuring them. Renar knew what he saw: sullen, fearful expressions. She wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. ‘No. There’s no amount of cubes. We’ve done our work and now we’re leaving. And you’d do the same if you had any wisdom in you.’

‘This is an outrage!’ Lanalan’s smile faded at last. ‘How do you expect us to transport our baggage without you?’

The captain wiped his brow, flicking the sweat to the ground. He’d taken a turn at the oars alongside his crew and Renar respected him for it. She’d respect him more if he managed to refuse her male sib. Sometimes it seemed that all but she were powerless to resist his charm. It was his helplessness, she thought, that weakened people so. Like a small child, he seemed in such need of care that others were always willing to provide it.

But not the captain. ‘I suppose you’ll have to carry it across one piece at a time. It could take a few days, but if it’s so important to you …’ He shrugged, then turned to his crew. ‘What are you loitering for? There’s a long way back to civilisation and no game to be had for leagues. Move, you vagabonds – I don’t pay you to idle.’

The oarsmen must have been exhausted after so long a journey, but they were as lively as grasshoppers as they rushed back up the stairway and to their boats. One moment she and Lanalan were surrounded by sailors, and the next they were surrounded only by their orphaned possessions. Nothing but the splash of oars above told that they were not entirely alone in this empty land.

‘They can’t do that!’ Lanalan said, his tone more hurt than angry. ‘How can they leave us so?’

Renar was already on her knees beside her two crates. A pack lay inside one, filled with her most essential possessions. She hadn’t known this would happen, but she’d known something might, and she didn’t enjoy being unprepared.

‘Just take clothes and a little food,’ she told Lanalan. ‘I have our gold – they value it hugely where we go. With gold we’ll be able to purchase all else we need, and we don’t have far to go.’

‘Not far!’ His woeful expression would have moved her if she hadn’t known him so well. ‘Why, the walk to the border is long enough and who knows how much further we must go beyond before we find another living creature. And I’m thirsty already!’

‘Then bring water. And hurry. I’d like to cross before the sun leaves us.’

He brought water and a lot else beside. He laboured under a heavy pack with two more in his hands as Renar strode ahead. She’d brought only food, clothes and the books she’d carefully selected before leaving Täm. Even so, her back and legs were aching before they’d covered half the distance to the wall. Lanalan was an even sorrier sight, his white skirt darkened by dust and his chest lightened where the dust had smeared into pale mud in his sweat.

They were being watched. Only here in the borderlands were there people to be found, guards dotted along the length of the wall, and a whole troop of them at the gate they approached. She saw their homes, small cubes little bigger than the shacks of the poor of the park. This was a hard service, chosen by lot and undertaken for only a quarter of a year. No wonder their expressions were so grim.

Their leader was a Mortal, black-robed and veiled. ‘Where are your oxen?’ she asked. ‘Where are your goods?’

‘We bring none. It’s not the purpose of this journey,’ Renar told her.

‘There is no other purpose that should bring a traveller here. Turn back.’

‘We have papers of transit,’ Lanalan declared.

He fumbled in his packs, cursing, until Renar drew out the papers from her own.

‘Signed by Remembrancer Bruyar.’ She handed them to the Mortal’s servant. ‘I trust you’ll find them in order.’

The Mortal’s expression couldn’t be seen. There was a long silence as she scanned the papers held out for her by her servant, longer than it could possibly take to read them. The guards shuffled and fidgeted but made no move to reach for the long-bladed falces slung at their sides. Renar didn’t suppose she and Lanalan looked particularly threatening, dusty and weary as they were. Besides, the guards weren’t there to prevent people leaving. Their job was to keep out what lay beyond the wall.

‘That’s Bruyar’s seal,’ the Mortal said, though Renar doubted she’d ever seen the Remembrancer’s mark to compare. One didn’t get posted to so distant and dry an outpost for being high in the favour of one’s superiors.

‘This voyage has been properly authorised,’ Renar agreed.

‘So what is your business beyond the wall?’

‘Why,’ Lanalan said, ‘we go to—’

‘We go about our own business,’ Renar interrupted. ‘Now if it won’t trouble you too much, perhaps you could let us pass? The day draws to its end and we’d prefer not to travel in darkness.’

The Mortal would have liked to argue. Renar didn’t need to see beneath her veil to know it. But she had no cause and grudgingly stepped aside. Four soldiers lifted the bar that held shut the gates, staggering beneath its weight as they carried it aside. Six more grasped rings set into the gates and heaved them open.

When they were still open only a crack, the fear hit her. It must have been there all along, waiting for the moment to pounce. Her throat was thick with it and her scalp aprickle. The gates swung easily on their hinges so that what lay beyond was revealed to her in an eerie silence.

Everyone knew of the Great Rift. It was marked on all the maps. But to see it – to finally see its size. She wondered why the wall was needed at all, when they had this to guard them from the god-sick.

The edges of the canyon were ragged, as if the two sides had been torn apart in some monumental fit of rage. It must have stretched a mile wide and more than a mile deep. The bottom was lost in darkness at this late hour of the day, but she could hear, echoing from the cliffs that bracketed it, the sounds of a wild river flowing. And on the far side was another wall, as pitiful as their own when seen atop the grandeur of the Rift.

A person might have climbed down the sides with ropes and strength and courage, but it would have taken almost inhuman strength to climb back up again. No wonder the invasion of the Supad Krik had failed so miserably and the god-sick had never tried that madness again.

There was only one wise way to cross the Great Rift and it lay ahead of them, the same cheerful amber as the wall. The bridge stretched in a straight line from their side of the Rift to the other. There was no visible means of support beneath it. Against the vastness of the canyon it seemed terrifyingly thin, but as she and Lanalan walked closer she saw that it was wide enough to bear three carts travelling abreast.

No railing guarded the bridge’s sides. She swallowed and took her first footstep onto the lacquered surface as close as she could judge to its middle.

‘La, we have arrived,’ Lanalan said.

Her sib’s voice was shaking. She felt a flush of unaccustomed sentiment and reached to take his hand. He clung to her as they walked on.

The wind blew strongly in the bridge’s centre and she fancied she felt it tremble. She trembled too, at the wind and the great drop beneath them and the unknown that lay ahead. There was a scent on the wind she didn’t recognise, some flower or herb that didn’t grow in Ofiklanod. They were truly beyond the borders of civilisation.

‘We could turn back,’ Lanalan suggested, though he kept on walking forward. ‘No one would think the less of us.’

They would, but that wasn’t what kept Renar striding on. There was a purpose to this visit, and Renar would see it done. And besides, beneath the overwhelming fear she could still feel her excitement. She might have lived her whole life, each day forgettably like the last, but this she would remember.

If, of course, she lived to remember it.

The end of the bridge approached at last, and another gate. The wall stretched into the distance to either side and she saw eyes peering at her from atop its rough bricks and mortar. It was altogether a more primitive thing than their own, and a little of her confidence returned. She held tight to it and raised her fist to knock on the wood of the gate.

These gates creaked as they swung inward. Renar had an instant’s warning to brace herself and then the crowd descended on them, shouting in a gabble of foreign voices and reaching out grasping hands for the packs on her and her sib’s backs.

‘We have no goods!’ she shouted. The press of people didn’t abate and she realised she’d spoken in her own tongue. She said it again more loudly in each of their barbaric languages, but they still paid her no mind until one of their own roared and gestured them back, leaving her room to breathe at last.

The man who’d rescued them was short, a head at least shorter than her and two shorter than her sib. His skin was light and his black hair entirely straight, but he might have walked the streets of Täm almost unremarked. Not so those around him. Their skin was as pale as milk and some among them had hair the colour of ripe corn. She’d known to expect it but it was still a shock to see it.

‘Forgive us,’ the short man said, in the language of the eastlanders. ‘It’s just that so few of you have come here lately, and we’ve wagonloads of goods to trade and no market.’

She could see their wagons now, circled in a ring behind them. Beside them ran a road, if you could call it that: unlacquered, muddy and deeply rutted.

Beyond stretched the beginning of the god-sick lands, a muddled patchwork of fields hemmed by low stone walls and more of these churned-up tracks between them. No wonder they were so desperate for the goods of Ofiklanod.

‘We did not come to trade,’ she said.

‘Didn’t you?’ The short man frowned. ‘Why else would you come?’

‘To see your prince,’ she told him. ‘The one they call Krishanjit, who is Yron reborn. The people of Ofiklanod, which once was the Eternal Empire of Mizhara, have need of him.’

Krish had pictured this moment as a boy. Poor and ignorant and landborn as he’d thought himself, he’d imagined one day walking down from the mountains into the heart of Ashanesland where the King ruled. He’d pictured it again when he’d learned the truth about his birth. In those visio