My skin tingled as I stood staring at my own fist.
“Damn, it’s great being me,” I said quietly.
“I must admit, with those women who follow you around, I wouldn’t mind being you, either.”
I whirled around to see Tahlis standing on the path to the temple, his arms folded.
“Maybe only for a day,” he continued. “But that would be enough.”
“I don’t mind you looking, but no touching,” I said.
“Oh, I would never dare.” He flashed me a grin. “Your women are your women.” He looked at the remnants of the shack I’d just destroyed. “That technique you just learned is Ground Strike. Be careful, it uses up a lot of Vigor, which is the reason it’s so powerful. At high levels, it can create a tsunami of earth that will knock holes in armies.”
“Nice,” I said as I looked from my first to the shack.
We headed into the Sunstone Temple. Despite the sophistication of the outside architecture, the interior was primitive in design, a cave-like space built from rough blocks of stone. From comparing the two ways of building, I suspected that this interior space was much older, a shrine from the early days of civilization in the valley, with the exterior being built around it later as extra protection for the priests and their servants.
The room we had entered was clearly the main chapel. Sunlight streamed in through the windows to illuminate statues of gods behind small altars lining the walls of the room. Some of the gods had been carved to look like sentient beings: humans, dwarves, lizardmen, elves, and so on. Others were stranger and more abstract, from a giant floating eye to something like a dog made out of rough, angular crystals.
A tall, broad-shouldered man knelt in front of one of the altars, with light brown hair hanging across his face. Incense smoke swirled from a bowl on the altar in front of him.
Kumi emerged from a side door and handed me a bowl. It held pieces of fish and scrambled eggs, wrapped up in a flatbread.
“Breakfast as promised,” she said. “Now, I’m going to sleep. We’ve got monastic cells on the next floor up.”
“Thank you.” I smiled as I gratefully accepted the food. “And goodnight.”
“There’s someone you should meet,” Tahlis said to me. “Come.”
He led me to the kneeling man, who looked up as we approached. He wore pale woolen robes marked with zigzag symbols, tied around with a sword belt. In the alcove behind him, a suit of banded metal armor sat in a discarded heap, its plates marked with the same zigzag symbol as his clothes. Gray flicked his beard, and crow’s feet stretched from the corners of his eyes. Despite his age, he was in incredible physical shape, impressively muscled and without an ounce of fat on display. He should have been imposing, but it was undermined by his slumped shoulders, his downcast eyes, and the sigh he let out as he got to his feet.
“My Lord Ganyir,” Tahlis said with a deep and apparently heartfelt bow. “May I present the Immortal Swordslinger, Ethan Murphy lo Pashat. Ethan, this is Ganyir, Lord Gonki, the rightful ruler of this province.”
“My lord.” I bowed at the waist.
“Enough of that.” Ganyir rubbed his eyes with one hand. “A lord would be ruling his city. I’m cast out here, with the vultures and the lizards.”
“There are worse things to be than a lizard, my lord,” Tahlis said sharply.
“Of course,” Ganyir said. “I’m sorry, Guildmaster. Sometimes, I forget myself. I have lost my city and with it, my responsibility to care for the Gonki Clan. I have no place offering insult to others.”
“I wish to ask a question, my lord,” I said. A few months ago, I would have outright asked it, but I now understood the customs of the Seven Realms. I might not have exactly liked them, but I wouldn’t shirk them needlessly.
“You can ask,” Ganyir replied. “Only time will tell if I can answer.”
“Why haven’t you taken back Hyng’ohr City?”
“You don’t fuck around, do you, Swordslinger?” Ganyir let out another sigh. “Come on, let’s take this out into the sunlight. Tahlis says it’s good for me.”
“Basking in sunlight is good for anyone,” Tahlis said as we walked back out into the temple’s minimalist grounds.
“For anyone?” I asked. “Or just for lizards?”
“If it’s good enough for us, then it’s definitely good enough for you shaved monkeys. Now, my lord, time to talk.”
“Fine, fine.” Ganyir walked over to the edge of the cliff at the base of the temple and looked down into the valley below. His head hung loose, and the wind blew strands of unkempt hair around his face. Out in the sunlight, it became obvious how worn and dirty his clothes were. “Hyng’ohr fell because I let my better nature get the best of me.”
“Pardon, my lord,” I said, “but that’s not much of an answer.”
“And I’m not much of a man.”
“Self-pity isn’t a good look on a ruler,” I said.
“My fist won’t be a good look on your face, but I’ll still leave you bloody.”
At last, there was a flash of something stronger in his eyes, a layer of steel beneath the loss. I smiled at finding something of the man that seemed to lurk beneath, but then his face fell again as he looked out toward the east, where the city lay.
“I lost the city long before I knew it,” Ganyir said. “There were warning signs, hints that Targin and Saruqin were up to no good, but I didn’t want to believe it. Not of my own brother. Not of our high priest. So, I let them continue, deluding myself that everything they did was for the good of the city, the good of the clan.
“Piece by piece, the Unswerving Shadows took over everything. Through cruelty and fear, they forced the people to bend to their will. Those who
