“Do you know what the most dangerous thing in the world is, Slider?”

“The alley between Wan’s butcher shop and the gambling parlor in the Bottoms?”

Ku the wind dragon begins puffing air in short bursts through the spiky tubes on his back.

From the way Edger’s shoulders rise and fall, she realizes this is the way he laughs out loud.

“That may very well be the most dangerous place you know,” he says, “but what, in your unusually vast observation, is the most dangerous thing?”

“I don’t know. A really, really big sword?”

Again, that reedy puffing “laughter.”

“You are as funny as you are wise beyond your years, but no. The most dangerous thing in the world is a story.”

Dyeawan is immediately intrigued.

“Which story?” she asks right away.

“The kind of story in which people believe utterly. The kind of story they believe in so fiercely they’ll leave their lives in the mud to protect it. You see, Slider, people do not fight for nations or rulers or causes or even land they believe to be theirs by some imagined right, not really. They fight for stories, about heroes and gods and long-past ancestors who were one or the other or both. So, you have to be very careful which stories are told to the people.”

Dyeawan moves her eyes over the triptychs and statues and tableaus threatening to burst forth from their canvas and stone prisons, so vibrant and striking and alive are their images.

“And these were all stories?”

“Yes.”

“Whose stories were they?”

“People who left their lives in the mud. Far too many people. So, some very wise men and women a long, long time ago realized they had to take these stories away and put them somewhere they’d be forgotten. They knew the people needed a new story, one story in which they could all believe, a story that would end the wars being fought and bring them together, make them into a single people, a single nation. That’s what Crache is. A better story. The best story ever told, in my humble opinion.”

Something occurs to Dyeawan then. She throws her gaze all over the space, examining each piece more closely, trying to disprove the thought.

“What about the God Stars?” she asks. “Why isn’t there anything in here about them?”

Edger doesn’t answer right away, and he doesn’t have to hold up a mask with the expression painted upon it for Dyeawan to know he’s surprised.

“We have many relics of the God Star faith,” he says, almost hesitantly. “They’re not kept here. It was not the belief of these people.”

“Where are they kept, then?”

“They’re stored with the rest of the disused creations of our drafters.”

Dyeawan looks up at him, first in confusion, then in shock.