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A decade since the Fivefold Church conquered the mile-high godpines and hanged their priests, settlements picked at the trunks like termites. Each godpine’s felling had shivered faraway cities to their foundations: small wonder that whole kingdoms hungered for lumber now. Or perhaps folk just liked the thought of chopping up a god for outhouses and chicken coops.

Ander Carmora hated the noise—endless sawmills, axes, oxen. His partner on this tithing tour, a dull man named Holand, didn’t seem to care about the sound, the stench of sap and five thousand souls, or much of anything else. The pair of them trudged down a mud road through the heart of town, keeping to the side as carts and work-teams passed. As tithe collectors they were the great Church’s finger, not the fist, and no man ever liked fingers in his purse. Fingers could get stepped on.

Along the side of the road, the ground was marshy, cold from the shade of boughs too vast to safely fell. Those who dug under this godpine’s fallen trunk swore whole rivers sluiced through shattered bedrock down there, or else these lands would have flooded by now, overflowing the new lake where the roots had reared up. Branches the size of carrack masts had gouged up mountains of black earth, twenty pennies a wagonload (two always tithed to the Fivefold). Little grew around the fallen tree, and not for lack of trying: anything of fertile worth had monetary worth too, and off it went to the cities and the great monasteries, one faith chewing up another.

Carmora found these logging-towns miserable. Taking tithes from working folk was bad enough, and the scent of torn-up dirt and sap pulled him back twenty years to his grandmother’s farm, in the shade of a living godpine. It was a sin to cling to scraps of childhood, the good days before the Church. It was nearly unthinkable, almost whipped out of him in youth, to remember those days as good.

Holand dragged him sideways as a wagon failed. A creaking wheel came apart in splinters. Fragrant timber thunked into the mud and put a cringe in the face of everyone who’d been standing within a hundred miles when the godpines fell.

Carmora shook off Holand’s hand, hating that his stolid partner had likely saved him from a broken leg. They got on poorly, had for weeks. Holand snored.

This was a road like any other, a stretch nestled between sawmills and rooming houses. “Let’s set up,” Holand said. “The wreck’s blocking the street.”

“Agh, here? It’s straight mud. At least up the way there’s a stewpot, spiced eel . . .”

Carmora’s alternative fell on uncaring ears. Holand was already disassembling his pack. Apart from a short sword and a tithe-book, collectors carried small folding tables and stools. A black linen drape made coins more visible and displayed the Fivefold rosette in silver thread.

Men and women in the street, those not busy with the lumber spill, looked to their own forearms. Some rolled up their sleeves, surreptitiously or showing off, to check how faded their rosette stamps might be—how due they were to reconcile.

Book, armored purse, bronze stamp, soapstone tray, ink-stick: the tools of a tithe collector’s trade. Carmora laid it all out precisely on the folding table before he tithed the first supplicant. He took a perverse pleasure in the delay, controlling what little he could, up to his ankles in mud.

Truth be told, most nights he slept exactly as well as a heretic in a gibbet cage, and not just from Holand’s snoring.

The first supplicant was a logger, a weathered axeman like a thousand others in spitting distance. He put down a stack of thin silver pennies. It was, Carmora knew, short. He didn’t even need to compare stamps to know that, but he took his time anyway, going back and forth between the faded ink rosette on the man’s forearm and the tattooed, multi-shaded version on his own. A tithe collector had a permanent rosette, parts of which appeared faded in precise gradations, so one could tell just how long since a supplicant’s last reconciliation. Darker skin, by blood or by outdoor labor, had natural penalties—reduced contrast, such was the rule—but even ignoring that, the rosette stamp on the man’s forearm was three months old. Ten percent of a timber grunt’s wages for three months would be at least twice as much silver as this man was offering.

Carmora eyed the logger’s poorly veiled apprehension and pressed his bronze stamp to the man’s arm, overwriting the previous mark. “You’re fully reconciled,” he said, and the spectre of twenty years of Church elders hissed at his corrupt and sinful mercy. “Go in peace.”

The logger glanced at Holand—currently tithing a caravan guard—and thought better of excessive thanks, which made everyone’s life easier.

Carmora marked the tally and the logger’s name in his tithe-book and tried not to let his hand shake. The silver vanished into the slot of the purse, which was leather over chainmail, latched in steel. Theoretically a tithe collector couldn’t open it, but he’d picked the lock out of boredom. Rank-and-file Churchmen, bound to a life of holy service, had precious few options for entertainment. Sometimes he marked the tally low, pocketing a penny that he never knew how to spend, but not this tour, not yet. Partners swapped books and purses daily, and Holand had an unnaturally good ear for the clinking tally. Carmora caught himself rubbing old penance scars on the back of his neck.

An ill-advised purpose was trying to form in his heart. Of course he’d fantasized about running from Church service, no matter how many enemies he’d make among the faithful—and how many others would happily waylay a tithe collector who left the Church’s protection. He could cover his tattoo. He could swing an ax like he’d done as a younger man, hacking at sacred roots with a Fivefold worship crew as his grandmother’s ghost wept over his shoulder. Freedom would almost be worth the risk, the shame, the weight of the gods’ eyes—

A woman stepped up to the table and cut his thoughts off at the knees.

She was Carmora’s age or maybe older, with a mud-spattered dress and a sharp grin. Red-brown hair a shade darker than his and done up in braids, hard muscle, hard hands. He couldn’t peg her occupation: she might’ve been a mill-worker, sex-worker, bough-climber, cook. She was exactly like everyone else in this town and utterly distinct. She carried herself like she owned herself and knew it, and she made him meet her eyes in a way he couldn’t break.

As a boy he’d tackled godpine roots the size of elephants, and chopped and seared Church vaults into solid heartwood. Deadly work when the smoke grew heavy and the tar ran thick. She reminded him of girls he’d known in the crews and the Church schools, known too briefly and not by name. He found himself looking for old scars, listening for a burned-tar cough.

“What’s your name?” he said, and he wasn’t asking for the tithe-book’s log.

That grin broadened. “Liste,” she said, a name that rang a bell, or maybe he just wished it did. “Do you have one too, Collector?”

“Carmora.” He tripped on his own disused first name—“Ander Carmora.”

Holand glanced over from his little table, where he was stamping the arm of a hunched woman with a child in tow. But Holand got back to taking scrupulous tithes, and Carmora felt alone in a good way he almost never felt.

Liste was rolling up her left sleeve already, cocking back her wrist to display the rosette stamp on the inside of her forearm. With her other hand she fished in her belt-purse and brought out a few pennies. Her fingertips fiddled with them on the black cloth, unwilling to yield them. Her other arm stayed still, ready for the stamp.

“Been in town long?” she said. “Have you tried the—”

“Thank you, that’ll be all,” said Carmora, a notch too loud, and his heart broke as her face froze. Because her motion, her eye contact, her casual chatter, were all to distract from the fact that her rosette was subtly wrong.

It was a tattoo, much plainer than his, meant to imitate a stamp faded by a few months. Some worksites, and more than a few guilds, only kept you on if your stamp stayed current. At border tolls and holy gates it would let her pass as a tithe-payer. You could save an awful lot of money that way. Every actual tithing reconciliation would be a risk for her, but a fresh stamp allowed certain other kinds of access and favor, too many to think through in this moment of realization.

Such frauds weren’t unknown among the desperate or carefree. His duty, absolutely, was arrest—one of the few circumstances where a tithe collector had such authority. He’d pay in blood if he shrugged off that command, worse than if they ever caught him skimming.

“Go in peace,” he added awkwardly in the silence, and moved to stamp her arm.

Something shifted in the corner of his eye. Liste jerked back and Carmora’s rosette stamp left ink all down her forearm to the crux of her pulse. Holand was lunging in, snaring that ink-smeared arm and wrenching it up. Liste went very still as the edge of Holand’s short sword nestled in against her throat.

Holand peered at the arm—the false rosette and the botched stamp over it—and gave Carmora an indignant glare. “Incompetence, corruption, or a pretty face,” said Holand, and the flat of his sword cracked against Liste’s skull. “What were you thinking, Carmora?”

Liste sagged in Holand’s grip. There were eyes on them, dozens. Carmora surged to his feet belatedly. The folding table and the tools of his trade scattered in the mud with stray pennies.

Wind shifted the giant boughs and mottled light flickered over the street like clouds were fleeing. From on high, dead pine needles as long as knives skittered off their shoulders, snagged in their hair. Holand let Liste fall in the mud.

Carmora kicked the fallen table aside and drew his sword. Like Holand’s, it was a workmanlike flat-ground thing, good for a hack and a stab and safety on the road. A simple grip, a lightly tarnished blade.

In the weeks since they met and their tour began, that offended fire in Holand’s eyes was something new. “Which was it, then?” Holand asked again, and his blandness had become, somehow, a deadly quiet. “Incompetence, corruption, or her face?”

Against all tactical sense, Holand’s eyes flicked sideways. Carmora followed Holand’s gaze and drew a shaky breath. A stone’s throw away, no more, an armored tithe-wagon was moving through the choked road, shouldering lesser traffic out of its way. Half a dozen collectors guarded it, and not the simple traveling kind with steel-bound wallets: hard Churchmen in armor, with rosettes on their pauldrons. If they hadn’t noticed the scene—two tithe collectors with drawn blades, a woman limp in the mud—they would soon enough. And if steel rang out against steel, they’d be here in heartbeats.

“Sheathe, boy,” said Holand, “or you’ll hang with her.”

Carmora slammed the tarnished sword back into its scabbard. His body was so tense with fury that he almost cut his own belt or thigh, and the sword went in askew, carving up the aperture of the scabbard. He forced himself to let go—and, more, to think just one step ahead, which was the best he could do. Every action, every threat, would make this worse for him, and for Liste as well. Maybe worse than execution.

• • • •

These days, the tithe-collection apparatus of the Fivefold Church kept vaulted blockhouses in any given godpine’s heartwood: too sensitive for common collectors to use as waystations, but suitable for prison and penitence. The walls and floors were dark seared wood that made his back ache just to look at it. A decade’s traffic had worn the floor smooth, but the walls still bore the marks of adzes and abrasive rocks.

This deep, there was no sense of day or night, just stark smoky lamplight as elders monitored Carmora’s penance. Failing to punish a false stamp meant ten self-inflicted lashes, bare-backed, gritting out the words of the law. Losing a few tithe-coins in the mud meant ten more lashes. He’d done penance many times before, earned absolution for this or that, but never without shame. This time he gave the whip his best efforts as a matter of defiance. He kept his feet, too, for defiance’s sake. These men had seen him on his knees: no more.

Faceless silhouettes, one of them with Holand’s voice, pronounced his penance complete and his disobedience purged. They left him coughing in a claustrophobic darkness of sweat and smoke and pine tar.

Fellow Churchmen had taken his sword, of course. They’d left him with the whip: five cords hard enough to break skin, each with a tidy bloody knot at the end. He rolled his shoulders and neck against the grip of the pain. All through the long inquisition—it was likely past midnight now—he’d clung to the most coherent thought he could muster: the question of what to do next.

He could go back to collecting tithes as any collector did after penance. Holand wouldn’t speak of his obviated sins again unless Carmora needed to be put in his place; such was the way of the Church.

He could, perhaps, just leave. Walk free and clear, wear a shirt with long sleeves, find work in another ugly lumber-town. Dodge Churchmen, maybe dodge a bounty.

But defiance, Carmora found, had an appetite once awoken. He shrugged back into his shirt despite how it stung the stripes on his back.

“Any advice?” he asked the godpine at last, as people here had done for centuries before the Fivefold toppled it with rope and axe and spell and prayer.

The tree offered no help. Even in life, by all accounts, the vast pines hadn’t been particularly useful or competent gods. He certainly couldn’t recall them doing much for his grandmother or her people. But felling each one had taken close to a year, and Carmora had often felt a grudging and heretical respect. He’d learned the godpines’ last lesson: when standing without options or help, you held out as long as you could, just on general principle.

That insight had stuck with him through his adult life as a tithe collector. He wondered whether the principle had taken him as far as it could. He imagined a world where he could triumph, not just endure.

He hefted the penance whip, a nearly worthless weapon. He stood there in the total dark for a long, long time.

• • • •

Carmora stole a candle from a worship-stand to navigate, but barely needed it. Other than the tithing-vaults and the elders’ chambers, these blockhouse carveouts were fairly simple. They all followed the same plan. He’d helped chop them in younger days, down here with chisels and mallets and hand-drills, floors tarry with sap until scorched clean. Some nights he still woke choking on the taste of burnt pitch.

The prison cell was much like the chapel where he’d done penance: a cavity chopped out of solid heartwood, lightless. His candle threw the gridded shadow of the cell grate. The shadow draped itself in twisted squares across the lone bench, which was just a block of unexcavated wood, of a piece with the wall and floor. There was a body on it.

“Liska,” Carmora said. “Liska, wake up.”

The body stirred. Eyes glinted by candlelight. “It’s Liste,” she reminded him. “You sound like you’re in pain, Ander Carmora.”

“And you don’t.”

“No, no penance for me, I’m told, just straightforward execution come morning.” Liste thunked the heel of her palm against the unyielding wall. “You have a key?” she said breezily, as if she expected the impossible yes.

“The closest I can offer,” he said.

He passed the whip through the steel bars. It thunked and slithered briefly on the dark floor. Liste sat up on the edge of the bench and squinted in the gloom.

“What is that—rope? Ninnagan’s teats, Carmora, we’re a hundred yards deep in solid wood. Where am I supposed to climb?”

That name picked at splinters of memory and stirred up his gut. “It’s your choice of two ways out.”

She squatted to snatch up the whip. “I don’t follow.”

“Church hangmen aren’t . . . they don’t always measure the rope and the drop the way they should, and they’re used to hanging . . . big men. I’ve seen it take a long time if they measure—”

“Yes, I know what I’m in for, I’ve seen a hanging, thank you.” Liste moved back onto the bench, coiling the whip around her hands. “You’re saying I should off myself first.”

Carmora shrugged miserably and felt the sting all up his neck. “Sorry to say, it’s what there is. The other choice is penance. Give yourself a whipping and maybe they’ll cancel the hanging so you’re not punished twice, so they’re not breaking scripture. Well, not scripture exactly, but procedure, and that’s almost the same—”

Liste laughed without humor. “Would that work? Have you seen that work? This is really the best mercy you can muster?”

Dropping the candle—it was little but a stub now anyway—he grabbed the bars and heaved. Steel clanged against anchored steel and shivered through the floor. “This door isn’t opening no matter what,” he grunted. “I’m trying to do right by you.”

“Oh, that’s a lie,” Liste said as the dropped candle guttered out. “That’s a shifty little lie, tithe-taker. You’re only here because you’re . . .” The candle died in truth just as she held up the whip, twisted around itself. “. . . tied up in knots. That’s not courage putting the spurs to you, it’s hate for your own weakness. Odds are, it drives you nowhere.”

The irregularities in the bars’ casting bit into Carmora’s palms, his fingers. He let go and stood in the dark, leaning on nothing, touching nothing, alone with the pain in his back.

The bundled whip hit the bars from the inside.

“You put yourself in here,” he said, “not me.”

“And I’m sure you’ll tell yourself that when I’m choking on a rope. You’ll say it over and over. You’ll pray to your hungry silent gods for reassurance that you owed me nothing. And they’ll never give you peace for long.” There was movement in the dark as she came toward the bars. Stalked, perhaps.

“Ninnagan,” he said, and heard her footsteps pause. “Who is that?”

The pause grew deep.

“Just one more god with no keys, Carmora. Just one more god chopped down. Some worshipped her along with the godpines—imagine that, the freedom to love two things at once. Hold out your hand.”

He put his hand through the bars. All clumsy in the pitch black, his fingers met mud-caked braids, then Liste’s hands. She pressed a cold stone figure into his palm and closed his fingers around it. He rubbed its age-smoothed features with his thumb. It felt like . . .

“An elephant?”

“Older and hairier. Ninnagan was a god of memory, far as anyone recalls: the memory of hurt you can’t undo. You Fivefold Churchmen promise that your way’s better than regret, but it’s a lie. Taking money from the poor, you’ll carry a weight forever, Carmora, and shrugging it off would be the real sin. Get me out of this cell.”

Liste was very close now, her breath warm on his chest, with only iron bars and darkness between them. With effort, Carmora pulled away. His heart shied away from the ask like a horse from a snake. He recognized, with deep discomfort, that he should be able to think about releasing her. He knew this instinct came from training and old buried fear, not from anything true or well-considered.

None of that knowing gave him much power to choose. It just made acquiescence miserable.

He tucked the stone mammoth—little more than an engraved pebble, really—into the simple belt-pouch he used for flint and steel and his own few coins.

“Goodbye, Liste.”

She could have screamed and called the guards down. Instead, she let him escape her in silence.

• • • •

By protocol there was a guardroom bunk available to penitents, an unpadded bench carved from a godpine grotto, like Liste’s cell without the bars. Carmora’s father had died sick and praying in a place like this, or so he’d heard once. Despite passers-by in clattering armor, despite the pain in his back and the fury Liste had thrown at him, Carmora slept deeply, too burned out for dreams.

The stone talisman nestled in his fist like it belonged there. His first conscious thought, come morning or what passed for morning here, was to wonder why he hadn’t dreamed of ancient gods, be they shaggy elephants or trees. His second thought was to remember that the Fivefold trampled all others beneath their feet. The silence of the gods was not by choice.

Presumably the Fivefold Church had thrown young men and warriors against Ninnagan just as they’d done against the godpines. A mammoth was an easier thing to erase, to forget, than a tree the size of a city. Cramped and agonized and half-awake on the bench, Carmora thought of reliquaries paneled in carved ivory and bone, grand things he’d glimpsed in the finest of the Fivefold sanctuaries, on the holiest days. How many willing servants had given themselves to secure each treasure in the Church’s innumerable vaults? And how many treasures represented an extracted sacrifice of lives and possibilities, whole cultures forgotten?

Ninnagan says remember. That voice, for once, was not his own. It felt more like memory than gods or magic. It was his grandmother, whose name he’d lost or never learned, a woman he recalled mostly as the scent of spiced eel stew and the thump of a mortar grinding acorn flour. And her weeping, never loud enough for anyone else to hear, as he worked the worship crews.

His mouth tasted like mud and bad sleep, but for a long few heartbeats what he tasted was that stew, the spice setting fire to his breath as he laughed. He must have been, what, five at most? Before his father took him to the Fivefold schools, and that last day, his grandmother’s face as the wagon left—

The voice went rhythmic, backed by the thump of feet in fresh grass, schoolyard play until a Church elder drummed the nonsense chant out of them.

nin-NAW-gin says

reMEMber every

THING you do that’s WRONG

ONly a COWard forGETS

forGOT

ONly a COWard forGOT

A whip cracked far away: memory, or maybe not. In a burst of clarity, he woke up far enough to open his eyes, to uncurl stiff limbs, and sit on the edge of the bunk. Still half-asleep, he thought of freeing Liste, and it seemed the most natural choice in the world. That level of defiance, for no reason he could fathom, was thinkable now, the barrier between wish and action gone.

He’d fallen asleep with shame and woke with it too—shame that he lacked the strength to really set her free—but last night had been just a knot of trapped misery. Today the shame felt ready to freely ignite.

There were lamps in the passage, guards moving about excitedly. There’d be a hanging soon, they said, some sacrilegious fraud.

Carmora breathed deep and stood.

Two steps took him to the aperture where the grotto became the central passage of the guardroom. A pair of men, armored for tithe-wagon duty, were coming down single file with their spears as walking sticks. The first one was just turning, lamp high, to speak over his shoulder.

Carmora planted his left hand on the fist that held the spear. His right yanked the short sword from the guard’s belt and jammed it up under the armpit where the travel-armor had a gap.

Hot blood sluiced over his sword hand faster than the scream, and certainly faster than the other guard knew what was happening. The lamp fell and smashed; oil smoldered on the charred old floor. As the dying man’s knees buckled, Carmora recognized him through the acrid smoke: Lanther Hodden, a tithe collector he’d done a tour with in younger days. They’d laughed over rabbit stew, dredged up childhood stories despite the risk that they might turn each other in for penance. Not a bad man, Hodden.

Ninnagan says remember that shame too, whispered a voice that was a child and also his grandmother and Liste in her cell.

There was still that second man behind Hodden, a guard flinching back from the scream and the fire. Carmora stepped over Hodden, stepped on him really, and put his descending body weight into a simple hack. The short sword sheared into the crook of the second man’s neck and put him down faster and quieter. One scream, then. Not an uncommon occurrence in here.

• • • •

After all that, neither dead man had a key to Liste’s cell.

Their armor was too complex to don quickly, but tithe-wagon guards had dense cloaks that could baffle an edge: Carmora shrugged into Hodden’s. The blood-slick fabric clung to his shirt and the whole affair rubbed awkwardly against his welted back.

As lamp-oil sputtered fitfully, Carmora took the time to secure Hodden’s sword-belt and spear, and to close Hodden’s eyes, for whatever that was worth.

Every wall was godpine heartwood, hard but not quite as dry as it should have been. In firelight, he got a better view of the way powdery sap had crystallized across the grain, a dusting over vibrant wood. The heartwood was drawing in resin, maybe starting a decades-long shift toward flammable fatwood, if the fallen tree lasted that long. The lamp-oil fire was creeping up the walls.

The air was never good in here, not with lamps and candles about, but this fire would make breathing even harder. Stay too long in a tunnel with even a small fire, and you’d die choking. He remembered that very, very well. Blockhouses like these had cost blood to excavate.

In a bone-deep way he felt like a child again—a young man, they’d called him at fourteen—wheeling smoke-blind through godpine passages like this one, tripping over friends. The old fear blazed up as bad balance, as tightness in all his joints, as a breath that wouldn’t come in. But he’d learned to control that terror once upon a time. He could do it again.

He looked back and forth down the passage, trying to remember which way he’d come last night to get here from Liste’s cell. He could search a good while for a key; he could search forever while smoke did the hangman’s work. Though the fire was just starting to blaze, it had a vindictive ugliness to it, like the godpine stirring for one last shot at revenge. He could well imagine the fire spreading fast and far.

Coughing through the front of his shirt, Carmora bent low beneath the smoke and hurried. He took his best guess at a course through the gloom. The ruddy glow kept pace with him, stalked him around each corner, fire just barely out of sight. Shouts were rising elsewhere, ahead and behind. Wind rushed and smoke twisted as someone opened windows, doors, trying to air things out. Heat roared in answer.

Men shoved past him in the smoky air, guards and elders both, coughing, dragging each other. They paid Carmora no attention. He had the deep unsettling sense that he was going the wrong direction.

“Does Ninnagan remember how to get there?” he mumbled to himself, and giggled.

Cold clean wind surged down from what he’d sworn was a dead-end passage. Fire crackled, blazing high. A blast of heat slapped him into a crux of tunnels.

Steel bars glinted behind rippling air. Staying low—he kept some presence of mind—he lurched that way.

• • • •

Smoke obscured Liste’s cell. Carmora wedged the spearpoint far under the bars and hauled upward. The spearshaft creaked, then slid on hot steel, defying his attempt at leverage.

The barred door swung freely regardless. It thunked against the wall, shivering, and the spear fell with a clatter. He pushed through whirling smoke into the cell.

Two figures crouched on the wooden bench, one looming over the other. Panic and fury spiked through the muck of his thoughts. “Get off her,” he growled, snagged the nearest shoulder, and yanked. The higher of the two figures, the aggressor, came away off the bench in a whirl of muddy skirts and red-brown hair. He caught just a glimpse of Liste, teeth bared in a snarl, before she shoved him.

He sprawled across the bench and the second body: Holand, eyes tight and staring, with the penance whip knotted into his neck. Holand scrabbled at the whip with the stubs of fingernails, but Liste had wound it too tight. Holand, at a guess, had come to take her to her execution—or perhaps ensure she died as the place came apart in panic.

Help me, said Holand’s eyes.

Steel rang just once, deep as a church bell. Carmora scrambled off his dying partner and turned clumsily. The door was shut.

Liste turned the key, coughing. Smoke hid whatever triumph or conflict she felt in the moment.

She lurched back as Carmora sagged against hot bars, rubbing at his stinging eyes, hands still tacky with Lanther Hodden’s blood. “Liste! Wait, open, uh . . .” He hawked and spat. “The door, Liste, open—”

She coughed something he didn’t catch, with the neck of her dress hiked up to cover her mouth. She backed away and was gone. For all her talk of the weight of regret, she could, apparently, live with leaving him to die.

Then again, facing execution for a tattoo, a little fraud . . . who wouldn’t kill two tithe collectors to cover an escape? One of necessity, and one as the witness to the first one’s death? Fair enough.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have thought so charitably most days, but with smoke heavy in his thoughts, he found it just made sense. He couldn’t fault her for his murder.

That got a chuckle out of him, then gasping laughter. Back over on the bench, Holand lay still. When had he died? That, too, struck Carmora as hilarious.

The fire was getting close now, and his head felt stuffed with rags. His pulse pounded in his throat. The flames roared—no, trumpeted like an elephant. He couldn’t recall why he was laughing.

Remember the spear, said that voice that was his and his grandmother’s and more.

The bars were too hot to lean on now. He sank down to his haunches and there was the spear by his feet, still threaded through the lowest bars of the door.

Are you letting yourself die? Are you such a coward?

The voice was nothing, had to be nothing, but it wasn’t wrong. He gripped the spear, drew and held a burning breath, and heaved. The godpine spearshaft bowed. Maybe it was cracking, but he heard only the snapping of pine resin in flame all down the halls. Smoke scoured his throat and blotted out his thoughts like ink spilled on a ledger. He lifted with his legs, head back, stinging eyes shut.

Metal grated and the load grew heavier. A sense of precarity, some shred of instinct, drove him back. The door was off its hinges and coming down askew. Steel scraped across pine and dug deep in a crunch of splinters. He released the spear; a heartbeat later, the twisting door slapped it implacably. Bars and spearblade torqued into the walls and held firm.

Out, then, squeezing through gaps fast as he could, staying low by old instinct. He’d come this way just twice, and his eyes still burned, but the memory of each turn came back sharp as a razor.

The bloody cloak repelled sparks. Wrap it around himself and he could bull stupidly through whole sheets of flame. He spotted the cloak with vomit more than once because that was the way of things with a bad fire, and stumbled on.

• • • •

When he tasted cold air, he wrapped the cloak tighter, became just another survivor milling in the mud. A handful of passages connected to the deep Fivefold chambers, and all of them were fountaining smoke or worse. Some elder was howling for water, and a young worship team struck up a bucket line from the lake down by the roots, for all the good it would do. This section of the vast tree was blackening, groaning, worthless.

Well, no, there’d be value found in ash and fire-hardened wood. Value reclaimed, too, from silver melting in the deepest vaults. The great logbooks would turn another page, uncaring.

Godpine bark smoldered or blazed outright as the night went on. Wind surged in and out, in and out. It stank of burning meat.

Carmora lingered in the corners of things, breathing deep and spitting out smoke. He rubbed a small stone mammoth between forefinger and thumb to keep himself awake. That felt important, if memory served.

• • • •

Around dawn his head went halfway clear, slow as the tar he hacked from his lungs. Smoke still rushed up the side of the godpine in rivulets, pooled in dead boughs high overhead. Every face he noticed, and he checked them all, was either soot-streaked and exhausted or just starting the day. Thousands had slept through the fire and subsequent panic. These things happened.

Somewhere along the way he’d paid all his pennies for half a loaf and a bowl of spiced eel stew. He chewed and slurped thoughtfully in a book behind a lumberyard, a good spot to watch Churchmen fuss around the ruined doors inset in the godpine.

Tithe collectors were working over there with spades and prybars. From time to time, nursing fresh burns, they’d lever up a slab of the silver that had overflowed down certain corridors from the coinage vaults. They’d ease the slab—still hot enough to welt skin—into the back of an armored tithe-wagon and send it off to some other vault. There was always another vault.

“Seeing you alive turns out to be a modest weight off my shoulders,” said a voice, “so I have a proposal.”

Liste unfolded from the morning shadows. She’d found a cleanish and prudently long-sleeved dress, even the wherewithal to let out her braids and wash her hair. She looked like she owned herself and knew it.

When Carmora found himself grinning like a fool, Liste came a little closer between stacks of sawn godpine. Not close enough to be at risk from the tarnished sword at his belt, but still.

“I think,” she said when he stumbled on his words, “I regret leaving you to die, and I carry around enough regrets already. And I think you regret taking money from me and a few thousand other folk who needed it. I say we let those sins cancel each other out.”

Carmora chewed on that and, though his own mountains of regrets clamored for attention, nodded. “So I’m supposed to forgive you for killing me—incompetently—and you forgive me for, what was it, five pennies? That sounds fair.”

“Good,” she said briskly. “I thought so too.”

Off by the armored wagons, an elder was wailing to the Fivefold over a slab of steaming metal just a bit too hot to touch. Other voices rose in prayer, in weeping. Carmora clamped his mouth shut against a laugh that could get him killed. As he fought for self-control, Liste braved his sword’s reach and stole what remained of the stew.