I stumbled to Shad, who knelt over Quon.

The air was deathly still. Quon’s eyes were wide open, as if staring off to something beyond. But his eyes began to fade, like dying embers of a fire. He gasped loudly, and for a moment he seemed to smile. He whispered a word I could not hear, then his lips froze stiff. Just then I felt a distinct updraft, a brush of wind rising from Quon’s body.

“Ichabod,” Shad whispered. “The glory has departed.”

I looked at the old man, searching his face.

“The temple has been deserted,” he said. “Quon has stepped out the door of this world and entered another.”

“No,” I cried. “It can’t be.”

I wrapped my arms around Quon, hoping to feel something. I didn’t. I sat back and looked at his lifeless body, then up at the sky. I raised my bloody fists, knife still in my right hand, and screamed my challenge upward.

“Whyyyyyy?”

14

THE COLD FRIGHT of the young man’s death dispersed the crowd, who hauled Fistface away to tend his injuries. Though my left shoulder burned, I carried Quon’s body to the cool of the willows, where the women peeked out, stunned and weeping.

I laid Quon down, then backed away to the trunk of the largest willow, huddling against the darkness. I fingered Fistface’s knife, cleaned it in a patch of long grass, then slipped it under my belt.

Maybe I’ll give it back to him—between his ribs.

I must have sat a long time, all my jumbled thoughts threads in one vast fabric of pain. Malaiki finally convinced me to join them in the camp and let her tend my wounds.

Reluctantly I emerged, light assaulting my eyes. I sat against a large rock in silence, staring at a circular white cloud wrapped around a jagged peak to the west, a stocking cap on a cold bare head. The southern face was a weather-shattered cliff on which I watched dark shadows play. This was Mount Peirasmos—the closer we got to it, the more it obscured my view of Charis. The thick red clouds had blown south and never dropped their rain on us. I wished they had, so that I wouldn’t need to hide the wetness on my face.

“I don’t get it,” I said, as Malaiki wrapped a bandage around my bruised ribs. “Quon served the King. He was so young. And he was my friend. Why would the King let him die?”

“All men die,” Shad said. “Most live and die for nothing. Quon lived and died for something.”

I cringed and turned my back on him. “He suffered,” I spit out. “The rocks, they … I should have …” I clenched my fists.