A sloped landscape of faces—bearded, painted, clean-shaven—watched.

Seven heartbeats of soundless thunder.

Blinking brilliance … and there he was.

He sat cross-legged, but not upon any surface Sorweel could see, his forehead bowed to the spear-point of his hands, which had been pressed, elbows out, together in prayer. A halo shone about his crownless head, like a golden, ethereal plate, laying at an angle behind his scalp. The image of him seemed to scald unblinking eyes.

A murmuring wave passed through the Lords of the Ordeal: furtive exclamations of joy and wonder. Sorweel cursed himself for clasping his chest, for quick breaths drawn through a throat like a burning reed.

Demon! he cried to himself, trying to summon his father’s face in his soul’s eye. Ciphrang!

But the Aspect-Emperor was speaking, his voice so broad, so simple and obvious, that gratitude welled through the young King of Sakarpas. It was a beloved voice, almost but not quite forgotten, here at last to soothe the anxious watches, to heal the sundered heart. Sorweel understood none of the words, and Eskeles sat slack and dumbstruck, apparently too overawed to translate. But the voice—the voice! Somehow spoken to many, and yet intended only for one, for him, for Sorweel alone, out of all the hundreds, the thousands! You, it whispered. Only you … A mother’s scolding cracked into laughter by love. A father’s coaxing crimped into tears by pride.

And then, just when this music had wholly captured him, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal crashed into it with a booming chorus. And Sorweel found himself understanding the words, for they belonged to the first thing Eskeles had taught him in Sheyic, the Temple Prayer …

Sweet God of Gods,
Who walk among us,
Hallowed are your many names …

And somehow, through the entirety of the recitation, the Anasûrimbor’s voice remained distinct, like a thread of milk in slow-curling waters. Sorweel pinched his lips into a line, steeled himself against the pitch of collective voices—against the tidal urge to pray with. At that moment, he understood what it meant to look out while others bowed their faces in worship. The groping of unanswered expectations, clammy and intangible. The fouled sense of defiance, like the sin of creeping awake through a house of sleepers. He exchanged a look with Zsoronga and saw in his eyes a more caustic version of his own bewildered dissent.

They were the fools here, not because they dared stand in the company of kneelers, but because being a fool consisted of no more than being thought so by others.

The chorus trailed into ringing silence.

His head bowed beneath a nimbus of gold, the Aspect-Emperor hung in a honey glow.

“Ishma tha serara!” one of the Nascenti, little more than a black silhouette before the image of his master, hollered to the darkest pockets of canvas. “Ishma tha—”

“Raise your faces,” Eskeles hissed almost inaudibly, apparently recalling his interpretive duties. “Raise your faces to the gaze of our Holy Aspect-Emperor.”