“It’s all right,” she heard Nraqi say behind her. She heard Xzem’s footfalls retreating. For a while, there was nothing, and then a soft, four-fingered hand brushed at her back. Amber tried to shrug it off, but the hand did not go.

“Come with me,” Nraqi said. She wasn’t a cat anymore.

Amber resisted, but the stiffness of her body beneath that gentle touch felt petty, a child’s tantrum. She turned around, away from the window and the lie of its reflection, and followed Nraqi through a heavy curtain, down a narrow, unlit hall, past banks of doors standing open on empty rooms, to a winding, rising stair.

It led up into the open air of a high-walled garden, long and oddly wedge-shaped, like a polite slice of cheesecake, with benches along the sides and a light at the pointy end. Two lights, really: a tall brazier of open coals below a hanging lamp with an opaque glass cover, both burning in full daylight. Over the walls, wisps of smoke and all the sounds and smells of the city reminded Amber of the world outside her own personal hell.

“This is my chapel,” said Nraqi. Her gaze trailed along the tops of the walls and all the way around. “The one below…a plaything for the House priests. I let them see me there at times, the way I let the linen girls see me at my wardrobe and the serving girls see me at tea. But I have worn the same three gowns every day for sixteen years and I hate the taste of frosted cakes. Here is my true chapel. Here is where I stand that I know…” Her head tipped back. The delicate fringe at the side of her hood fluttered in the breeze. “…I know God sees me.”

“I can’t,” said Amber, shaking her head in tight, hurtful jerks. “I’m sorry, lady. I know you mean well, but I can’t listen to that right now.”

“I had never felt His eye upon me before,” said Nraqi, still serenely watching the clouds roll by. “Not all my childhood years in my father’s House, not with all the prayers I learned to sing or in all the hours I learned to kneel so still and just…just think of nicer things. I never saw God when they took me out from Gelsik and across the mountains to this place. I did not see Him in my lord-husband’s face on the night I was given to him, conquered by him. I was, I think, eleven years gone in this House before I ever knew God as more than a word in the mouths of old men, and it was here. My little one, my Varis…three times, I carried her and three times, Gann snatched her back and those wicked old men wouldn’t even let me sit with her after she was gone, so I was here. And Jazuun brought her to me. And we sat together. It is such a quiet thing, Eshiqi—” Nraqi reached back and took Amber’s hand, lightly squeezing. “—when God speaks.”

“I don’t want to hear Him telling me there’s nothing He can do,” said Amber hoarsely. “I don’t want to hear Him tell me to suck it up! I don’t want to be saved if it means watching him die anyway!” She fought with it, lost, and burst out, “I can’t lose everything, damn it! He can’t do that to me! It isn’t right!”

There was more, but even that much was too garbled by tears to understand and no one up here spoke English except her anyway. Nraqi tried to put her arms around her. Amber stumbled back, but Nraqi wouldn’t let go and after the run she’d just had, Amber didn’t have it in her to struggle for long. At the end of it, exhausted, she simply slid down on her knees with her hands folded limply in her lap, leaned her forehead into Nraqi’s hip, and bawled.

“God does not always give us what we ask for,” Nraqi said, wrapping her in folds of her robe to shelter her from the wind. “But after all my years, I have come to believe He gives us what He can. So pray, even if all He can do is sit beside you. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but sometimes, I tell you, it is everything.”

* * *

Meoraq had not known he was dying, but he knew the very moment he was dead. He knew not because he was standing and not because he was no longer in pain, although both these things should have been clues, but because he was at home. He was in Xeqor, standing in his father’s rooftop garden, where the breeze was impossibly sweet and the sky, filled with lights. Stars, Amber had called them. The sky was filled with stars and so Meoraq knew he was dead.

He went to a bench. He would have liked to have at least staggered there, but this body was fit and strong, and his mind filled with rest. So he just walked. And sat.

Meoraq waited. He’d heard about things like this—for as long as there had been death, he supposed there had been men who had gone only to the threshold and come back to tell of it—and he already knew it wasn’t going right. There was no dark tunnel, no pure white light, no Sheul to reach out His arms in welcome, only this familiar and disturbingly silent setting and an alien, glittering sky.

He was not alone, although he appeared to be. He could feel eyes on him…but that wasn’t right. What he felt was not a sense of being watched as much as companionship. He found himself looking around quite often, trying to see whoever it was with him, but although the rooftop of the city burned with hundreds of fires, he saw no one. The world of the dead, it seemed, was as empty as the world of the living.

Perhaps this was Hell, he thought. And it was not the endless walk across the grey wastes of Gann after all, but only this glimpse of what might have been paradise, and himself, alone.

No sooner had this bleak thought occurred than it was disproven.

Rasozul appeared on the bench beside him—a much younger man than Meoraq had known, but it was Rasozul and not just a familiar face for someone else, some Other, to wear.

Meoraq leaned sidelong into him at once, not like a grown man at all, but like a boy. His chest ached, thick with unhappiness, but he could not cry here. It was impossible to cry here. Because he was dead.

His father did not ask questions. Explanations were unnecessary. Understanding moved between them, unspoken, more complete than anything words could accomplish anyway. His father knew all about Amber, the way he heard and accepted Meoraq’s apology for all the years of thoughtless disdain he’d shown Yecidi, who had always loved him anyway.

“What happens now?” Meoraq asked at last, because that was the only thing unclear to him. It felt like forever in every second. Amber might have been alone out in the world for years already.

“I can’t answer that, son.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

Rasozul smiled and slipped his arm around him like he’d done it all his life and not for the first time. “I mean I can’t answer for you. If you wanted to know, you’d already be moving on.”

“Moving…? Isn’t this it?”

“Not quite.”

“I don’t understand,” said Meoraq.

Rasozul acknowledged this with a smile, but made no attempt to explain.

“There’s either more or there isn’t! How can this be ‘not quite’ all there is?”

“It would depend.”

“On what?” Meoraq demanded, as frustrated as he could bring himself to be in this perfect place.

But Rasozul’s smile was just the same. “On where it is you think we are now,” he said patiently. “And why you need to be there.”

Meoraq looked around at the rooftop, the stars, the empty wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls. “Am I making this up?” he asked uncertainly.

“Not exactly.”

“Are there…Halls? Is there…” Meoraq clapped a hand to his eyes, but there was no way to hide shame anymore. He wished there was, and that was shameful too. “Is there a God?” he whispered brokenly. “Are there Halls where He resides? I’m not asking for welcome, I just need to know!”

“Ah, my son…” Rasozul pulled Meoraq against his broad, unscarred chest and rubbed his back. “Why would you not be welcome?”

And he couldn’t cry in this place, not with these eyes, but there could still be pain and it came splintering out of him: years of murder, of death within the arena and without, from the very first—that brunt in Tilev and the feel of his bones breaking—to the last raider in the ruins; every theft taken as a Sheulek’s due from men who did not dare to refuse him; every woman bent and used and mostly forgotten, and like the murders he had done, they were not uncounted anymore, not here. He saw them all, each one a stone in his heart until the weight was more than he could carry and he covered his face again and cried out, “Father, I have done such terrible things!”