Djola smashed in more doors. Samina had died in a hut like this. She’d pulled Djola into her final living journey to Smokeland and urged him to end transgressor torture. Do this for me, she said as they walked a starway over poison desert to mountain forests where evergreen woods and snowfields claimed her spirit body. These cold memories shielded him during Xhalan Xhala, yet tormented him afterward. He knocked the last door open. “How much blood and tree oil?” He hissed in Hezram’s face.

“Those people do penance—” Every hovel door stood wide. Hezram shook his head. “For grave offenses—”

“Singing tree songs? Talking to mountains and dirt? Hush. I might have to break your neck if you talk on. That isn’t part of our plan. Samina told me…” Djola spoke his wife’s name out loud for the first time in two years. His tongue ached. “Samina said change, not revenge, is salvation.”

“Samina? I do know you.” Hezram scrutinized Djola from tattooed skull to booted ankle. “Emperor Azizi banished you. The Master of Poisons?”

“I am changed.” Following another rogue impulse, Djola barged past Hezram. Prostrate priests rolled aside as he strode to the Green Gates. Tall as cathedral trees and wide as the courtyard, the ancient entryway was covered in rust and moss. With both hands bare, Djola pressed against the copper and iron lacework. The massive structure shivered and shrieked.

Nobody had entered the Green Gates from the courtyard in over a decade. Wild green lands were ruthlessly guarded treasure. Priests used secret underground passages to tend livestock or harvest groves. Witchdoctors opened the south gates to the Empire Road from the inside with keys, drummed incantations, and an army of warrior-acolytes.

Hezram chanted a witchdoctor spell calling the Green Gates to full power. Poachers who broke through metal lacework or scaled corral fences first lost control of their bowels, then their hearts beat out of rhythm as jumbled minds wandered. Raving and shitting blood, would-be thieves died of heart failure. Their spirit bodies increased the gates’ power. As Hezram sang the last line of his spell, keening echoed in the courtyard. Djola shrugged at haints drifting through him—his heart and mind were a fortress. Still, challenging the gate-spell, the hairline crack around his heart twanged. He could live with that and a few farts. The gates swung open, tearing apart a snarl of vines and bushes. Rodents scurried from ruined nests, yammering with the good citizens whose eyes popped wide open.

A cathedral-wood corral enclosed a maze of meadows and groves. Fruit trees with heavy crowns nodded in bright sun. Wild flowers scented the breeze. A string of weaver ants bent leaves for a nest. Plump birds from the south splashed in a pond. A fat creature with a pink snout rooted in mud, squealing at worms. The hidden bounty silenced the mob and angered Djola.