It would shock him, actually, but it was also disturbingly easy to visualize. Lord Saluuk learning of his daughter’s pregnancy and, knowing Gann’s taint would soon be visible to all, making certain she carried an honorable scar. He had been a Sheulek once, and doubtless knew how the women of a Sheulek’s many conquests melted together over time. Perhaps another Sheulek would have accepted his responsibilities without contest, and who knew? If the girl had not been so memorable in her tears, Meoraq might have been fooled. She was so very skilled an actress (I have known no other man but you) that a part of him was tempted (those pleading, tear-filled eyes) to believe her even now.

There were men in the world who actually envied a Sheulek the liberty to take whatever woman Sheul moved him to take, not realizing that so many of those women were sired by men like Arug or Saluuk, that the women themselves were largely forgettable, and that years of exposure to all of Gann’s carnality and deceit made a man see it everywhere. In everyone.

Meoraq walked, lost in brooding thoughts of conniving fathers and flat-headed babies, as the usher escorted him to the outer courtyard of the shrine. The priest waiting to admit him offered prayers, which Meoraq, in his black mood, felt strongly compelled to accept. His meditations were lengthy and fruitless, scored through by disruptive visions of Saluuk’s Gann-lost girl and her baby, and he did not end them so much as abandon them for another night. He did not notice that they were not taking the right way to the garrison until he followed the usher through a door and found himself in the holy forge at the shrine’s heart.

A white-cowled priest stood before the eternal fires, his hood pulled low over his eyes. His robes were richly trimmed, the hem weighted with gold plates and cut to glide just above the floor rather than pick up even a trace of dirt. Each finger was armored to the tip with delicate bands of fine metal. His color was so heavily crusted with jewels, it was a wonder he could breathe. He did not bother to acknowledge Meoraq, although he had surely heard him enter.

“You wished to speak with me?” said Meoraq after a few calming breaths. He would have liked to demand that he be shown a Sheulek’s proper respect and damn well be left alone, but he’d indulged in enough shameful behavior for one night. He would show his divine Father repentance with patience and respect, even if it was a damned inconvenience.

The priest turned, pushing back his hood to get a better look at him. “Sheulek,” he said, eyeing his sabks. “You are Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor?”

Obviously. How many other Sheuleks do you have in your damned city tonight?

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience,’ Meoraq thought. He said, politely, “I am.”

“I am Exarch Ylsathoc Hirut.”

Meoraq waited.

The exarch frowned, clearly annoyed that he did not fall back cowering at the name. “Surely you were told that I wished to speak with you as soon as you arrived, as I was told the moment that you passed the gates of this city. But that was more than an hour ago. And here I have been. Waiting.”

I am a Sheulek and I go where I fucking well will.

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “It is my duty to attend Sheul’s judgments before attending to my own personal audiences,” Meoraq said.

“I see. So be it. At least you are here now. I had begun to think you had forgotten this stop upon your circuit, although I can easily see why you would. Sheul the All-Father surely knows that it is only my love for Him that holds me in this pisspot, but then, I was born in Gedai and know better how a city ought to be. You, now…” The exarch cast a disapproving look back at him over his shoulder. “Where have you been?”

Engaged in the duties I am sworn to and the privileges I am owed, one of which may include putting a knife in that eye if you roll it at me again.

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “I was detained at Xheoth.”

Ylsathoc grunted, then turned all the way around. He held out a long, pale object which Meoraq actually needed in his hands before he recognized it as a thigh bone.

Its meaning stabbed into him like a knife’s blade. And twisted.

“Your father is dead,” said the exarch without further preamble. “Sheul has named you steward of House Uyane. Xeqor awaits her champion.”

4

The exarch wanted to read him the oaths immediately, but Meoraq refused to hear them. He was given the use of the temple’s finest room for his bedchamber that night, but he didn’t use it save as a place to store his pack. He went instead to the innermost cloister and there knelt at a firelit shrine with the knife of his fathers heavy over his heart.

The holy smiths of Xi’Tothax executed their craft well; his father’s thigh bone had been expertly cut and carved to make the hilt which the reforged blade so perfectly fit. It was not quite the knife he remembered hanging from his father’s neck, but he was proud to carry it, as proud as he was reticent to claim it.

His feelings had no bearing on the matter. In accordance with the law, it was his own, and unless it passed to the hand of one of his brothers before the turning of the year, it would be his forever. Or at least until his death, when it would be broken, the hilted half burnt with him upon his pyre and the edge sent onward to his future son. This was House Uyane, ever-changing and eternal as this knife, and he should be honored to take his place in that endless line.

He should be.

And yet…

Meoraq knelt, sleepless, for all the hours of the night as priests and other residents of the temple district came and went. He made all the appropriate prayers, but he didn’t feel the bereavement he felt he’d ought to and the psalms tasted of lies in his mouth. Eventually, he gave them up and fell silent, although he remained bent before the fires, brooding.

He wondered if it marked him for a bad son for thinking more of the House he was doomed to inherit rather than the man he had inherited it from, but he couldn’t help that. He’d loved his father, in the same way and at much the same distance as he loved Sheul, but he didn’t know him well. Why shouldn’t the legal problems of the House weigh on him in his first hours of mourning? He knew the law better than he’d known Uyane Rasozul.

He had left home at the age of three to begin his training, like all sons born under the sign of the Blade, and although he had wintered each year at home in Xeqor, he had seen little of its lord. Since taking his oaths, it seemed Meoraq had even less time at Uyane, although he stopped in whenever his circuit brought him near enough to make such a diversion possible. Rasozul always made time to receive him if he was in, but he was much withdrawn since the death of Meoraq’s mother and there weren’t many pleasant times to recall now.

Here in Xi’Tothax, many days distant from Xeqor and the House he must assume, Meoraq brooded. He was proud of his father, proud to wear this knife and touch the smooth, solid bone of its hilt, but all his pride seemed to spring from other people’s memories. Meoraq didn’t know the hero of Kuaq, who had climbed the walls when raiders held that city’s gates and cut through a hundred and eleven men alone, one of them the Raider-Lord Szadt, the most evil man ever gone to Gann. He didn’t know the Sheulek who had, in the course of his service, emerged the honest victor of more than one thousand battles, better than twice the account most Sheulek could expect. He had never seen the man his training masters remembered, never knew the reasons men invariably paused when they heard Meoraq’s name and came back to say, “Uyane of Xeqor? A son of Rasozul?”

No. Meoraq knew no hero, but only the man who sat in his rooftop garden in the evenings, preferring to sit on the tiles with his back propped against his chair as he read. He knew no warrior, but only the father who sometimes tapped at Meoraq’s door if he saw a light beneath it, bringing hot tea on cold nights and trading tales of roads they had both traveled, each in his own time. He knew no Rasozul, but the husband who showed altogether too much attention to the woman who wived him and who had mourned her with embarrassing steadfastness for seven years now. And that was still a good man, surely, but no man to inspire a full night’s worth of prayer. He prayed anyway…yet his mind wandered, and eventually he cried surrender and let it.