“You had the juice to ask,” Tsazr said, reseating himself in the window. “I suppose I should have the juice to answer. It was enough…until about eighteen years ago. My last circuit as Sheulek, in fact. Something happened that made me think I could actually open the doors at Xi’Matezh if I ever went. It’s been itching at me ever since, the idea that there could be something more than the Word…something just for me. And there was. And it was terrible to hear. Do you still want to know what He said, boy?”

Meoraq opened his mouth and made himself close it. He thought long enough that Tsazr turned away from the clouds and the light of the sun that shone through them to look at him.

“Yes,” said Meoraq slowly.

“Why?”

“Because…Because they were His words.”

Tsazr’s expression shifted somehow, but in a way difficult to define. “So?”

“In school, they taught us—”

“If you give me a schoolroom answer, I’ll crack your bones for you, sprat,” Tsazr said. “I don’t care who your father is and in this moment, I don’t even care what it will do to your mother. I will snap something fresh for every word you are about to utter and make you count them off when I do.”

Meoraq hesitated, then plunged on ahead with a kind of despairing courage. “In school, they taught us that truth is only truth when everything is heard. Every word of the Word changes all the rest of them. So whatever He told you…it changes the truth in the Word.” He paused, but Tsazr only watched him, frowning. “And I want to know how,” he finished lamely.

Tsazr just looked at him as Meoraq’s heart hammered against his as-yet-unbroken ribs.

“Not so much a schoolroom answer,” Tsazr murmured at last. “You did all right by this one, Razi. At least you gave him all the brains you scooped out of Salkith.”

Meoraq waited, not entirely confident that he had escaped.

“Truth,” said Tsazr after another minute or two.

“Sir?”

“You want to know the truth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course you do. That’s your blood-right talking to you, boy. Your history. Your destiny. Because that is what we do, Uyane.”

“We, sir?”

“You’ll be Sheulek at the end of all this,” Tsazr said with a cross, dismissive wave. “We all know it, so shut your mouth and mark me, because this is important. The other boys here, they think being Sheulek is about glorious battles and walking freely through any gate they please. To them, the call to carry the honor-blades is nothing but a writ of privilege over any man they meet. Or any woman.” Tsazr snorted and looked out the window. “Is that about what you think, Uyane?”

Meoraq stifled a premonitory cringe and said, “All these things are the right of a Sheulek, sir.”

“Not your best answer tonight,” Tsazr said wryly. “I’ll let you try again out of respect for your father before I knock you down. Is that what you think being a Sheulek is? What it means?”

“What something is and what it means aren’t always the same.”

Tsazr looked at him sharply, his spines flat. “Example?” he inquired in a low, dangerous voice.

“Being a brunt,” said Meoraq.

His master stared, his expression growing slowly more thoughtful as his spines came forward. “Truth,” he said after a very long time. “You really are doing very well tonight. So let me tell you about women, brunt. I have had more of them than I can count. I mean just what I say. More than I can count. But I remember only three…and one of them is your mother and I never laid a hand on her. What does that tell you?”

It told him that sex probably wasn’t very memorable and if that was the truth, Meoraq wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. He wasn’t a child; the last of his scales had turned black before he’d received his brunt’s tabard and the incident that had led to the metal loin-plate he was now wearing (and would wear for the rest of his life) had been dimming in the back of his mind for two years now. No, there were no women in Tilev and none at home, excepting servants glimpsed as they went swiftly and silently about their business, but there would be women someday and after two years wrestling with Gann’s temptations, he’d hoped the wait would be worth it. Now his master was staring him down, so Meoraq groped for an honest answer and finally managed, “I know nothing about women, sir.”

Tsazr heaved a short, impatient sigh and cut his hand through the air. “Fine. We’ll have to talk again someday, but for right now, we’ll stick to truth. That is the true work of a Sheulek. Never mind what they tell you in school about law and government or even about the Word itself. When we step into that arena, it is not for glory, not for women, not even for God, but for only truth. We accept that we may die and we embrace that death if it means the truth is exposed. Do you hear me, Uyane?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tsazr grunted and eyed him for a moment before looking back out the window. “And do you understand me?”

Meoraq braced himself once more for that slap. “No, sir.”

But Tsazr pointed two fingers at him and said, “Truth. I don’t know if you mean it, but that doesn’t matter. You spoke and I judge your words to be true ones, regardless of your motives. That’s my whole point, boy. Why does not matter to us. Only truth.” He fell quiet for a time, then said, “And truth does not care if it comforts you.”

Out in the greater hall, the bells rang for the mid-day meal. Tsazr stirred himself, glanced at Meoraq and then swept a hand over his snout.

“So here it is,” he said. “The truth that changes everything. Prepare yourself.”

Meoraq bent his neck and took several deep breaths, forcing his muscles to unlock and his heart to beat slow. Nothing he was about to hear could be a good thing, but he meant to meet it fairly. At last he looked up, calm. “I mark you, Master.”

“The truth,” said Tsazr, “is that if you want to know what I heard in Xi’Matezh, go there.”

Meoraq’s breath fell out of him in a disorienting rush that was part relief and part disappointment, and for the life of him, he couldn’t have said which was the larger part. “Sir?”

“I can read the Word to you, Uyane. I can’t read it for you. Go on.” He rubbed at his snout some more. “Get out of my room. I’ll put my boots in the hall for you when I’m damned good and ready.”

Meoraq turned around at once, but paused after only a few steps. He told himself he was not defying a direct order as he had every intention of obeying it…right after he asked one thing. “Sir?”

“I ordered you out, brunt.”

“Yes, sir.” But his feet wouldn’t move.

“I give you a choice, Uyane, because I’m in that sort of mood, although not for much longer. Here it is. You can walk out of here right now without getting hurt, or you can stay and say what you want to say. I’ll let you and I may even answer, but I absolutely will beat you down for it.”

“What happened that made you think the doors at Xi’Matezh would open?”

Silence. It grew at his back until he was forced to turn around and face the slap.

This time, Tsazr gave it to him. Hard. But as Meoraq unsteadily straightened himself, Tsazr said, with singular bitterness, “Nuu Sukaga.”

And after everything he’d heard, that was still bizarre enough to make Meoraq forget the immediate pain throbbing through his snout. “Sir?”

“Nuu Sukaga. I waited eighteen years to say it and you are exactly right, Uyane. Those two words changed all the others. Now get out,” Tsazr said, sitting back down in the window. “Or you’ll be cleaning my boots from the infirmary.”

Meoraq went and since nothing more happened that day (it remained the longest and strangest conversation he was ever to have with Master Tsazr, who never mentioned it, or the name, if it was a name, of Nuu Sukaga, again), he let the memory go and brought himself gradually back to the present to think about what it meant.