text: The way back to Oma's temple was swift. Ahkio and Caisa went by Line. The stories from Liona would spread. They would get worse when people found out he'd sent some scullery drudge from Dorinah to the harbor to help with defenses. An omajista's place was there, at their most vulnerable point, but it would make her look just like the divine thing she said she was, and that worried him.
  
  When he arrived, Ora Una, the gatekeeper, told him the Tai Mora emissary was in the garden. Ahkio crossed the foyer with Caisa to the entrance to the back garden. His stride was longer, and she skipped to keep up.
  
  Ahkio followed the winding path through the garden. Most of the greenery was still dormant, waiting for the first kiss of spring. Caisa hurried beside him, her breath crystallizing in the cool mid-morning air. A mist had descended, and still clung to the bases of the trees. The central fountain, its centerpiece a massive three-pronged claw that mirrored the shape of the temple, had been drained. It stood still and silent, its crown lost to the mist.
  
  "Is this some emissary from the south?" Caisa said, rubbing her shoulders. He realized only then that he had given her no indication of who the emissary was.
  
  Ahkio rounded the fountain and went up a broad set of stone steps to a great living structure of bowed bonsa saplings draped in withered wisteria. A slim figure stood beneath it, gazing out toward the great chasm that held the Fire River in its mouth.
  
  "Hello," Ahkio said.
  
  The figure turned. She was a slight woman with a broad grin. Her dark hair was cut strangely, as if hacked with a hatchet. She wore a long blue coat of what looked like wool and died fireweed cord.
  
  "You must be the Kai," the emissary said. "I know your face. I am Hofsha Sorek."
  
  Caisa made a sound behind him. Ahkio turned. Caisa had stopped at the base of the steps, hand on the hilt of her weapon.
  
  He glanced back at Hofsha. Hofsha's grin had faded. "Do the two of you know each other?" Ahkio asked.
  
  "I have known this little boy since he was a pup," Hofsha said.
  
  "You've mistaken Caisa for someone else, then. Caisa is a woman, not a boy."
  
  "Not where I'm from," Hofsha said. "Where I'm from you get a pronoun at birth and you keep it, like a civilized person."
  
  "How does she know you, Caisa?"
  
  Caisa's mouth moved, but no sound came out.
  
  "Caisa?" Ahkio said.
  
  Ahkio felt a chill. I wasn't sure she was on our side, Liaro had said, back when the council house in Raona had burned. But Caisa had hacked apart the man who had wanted to take Ahkio's life. She stood by him with Liaro when he was ill and brought him to Kuallina. Was she really Tai Mora or some Tai Mora's twin?
  
  "Wait for me inside, Caisa," Ahkio said.
  
  "I can explain," Caisa said. "You don't want to be alone with her!"
  
  "I suspect Hofsha isn't here for murder," Ahkio said. "We'll speak later."
  
  Caisa ran down the steps and through the garden.
  
  Ahkio regarded Hofsha. "She's one of yours, then? How long ago did you put her here?"
  
  "Not at all," Hofsha said. "He's a runaway from our parajista ranks. We sent the hounds after him, but had very little luck. Now I know why."
  
  "Hounds?"
  
  "It's how we retrieve our people," Hofsha said. "Deserters, and the like."
  
  "I expect you have a lot of those."
  
  "Less than you think." Hofsha smiled.
  
  Ahkio rose to the bait, and came up the rest of the steps. He stood beside her, his elbow placed a few inches from hers. "You come here alone, ungifted, to parley?"
  
  "My gift is not with the satellites," Hofsha said, stirring her fingers in the air. "My gift is with people. Moving them. Managing them. Mitigating harm to them."
  
  "What do you need here that you can get from me without blood?"
  
  "A peaceful surrender," Hofsha said. "I've come here to save you from a very prolonged death by starvation and disease. I've seen it happen to a hundred and twenty-seven countries across three worlds. My Empress, my Kai, always gets what she wants. It's up to you to decide in what way it's delivered to her."
  
  "You haven't fought us before."
  
  Hofsha patted the railing. "I'm afraid we need your temples."
  
  A fist of fear squeezed Ahkio's heart. The heart of Oma's seat. The riddle of the temples.
  
  "What would you need the temples for?" Ahkio asked.
  
  "My Empress is weary, she will be the first to admit, but also merciful. It doesn't please us to kill so many. We'll take the temples, and you'll all keep your lives."
  
  "What will you do with the temples, Hofsha?"
  
  "What do you care, as long as you have your lives? I promise you, Kai, I am offering you a way out of madness and bloodshed. So much you can't even fathom it. What do you have left here? Twenty thousand people? Thirty thousand? Hardly a drop in a pond. The Dhai left in this world just barely register as a people."
  
  "What else?" He remembered Kirana killing herself before her shadow could do it, ensuring he ascended to Kai before her shadow moved in. It was why she waited until he was safely inside Oma's Temple before perishing. Did they know how that worked yet? Or would that wait until they'd already come in and discovered that the new Kirana had to be Kai to unlock the temple's heart? Would they ask him to open the way for her? And when they activated the temples to do… whatever they did, what would happen to the rest of the world? The world broke when Oma rose. Ahkio suspected the temples played a large part in that.
  
  "Oh, there's one more thing," Hofsha said, "but it's a trifle. There's a woman we're looking for. I believe you know her. Yisaoh Alais Garika. If you could assist us in finding her, we'd think most kindly of you."
  
  "If I had any idea about where to find Yisaoh, I'd happily tell you where she was." Right up until Ahkio said it aloud, he believed it. But he was not that man.
  
  "Well, it will be appreciated. What do you say to our offer, Kai? It's been some time since I came to the leader of a country with such a fine offer. It's usually very bad news."
  
  "What are the usual terms?"
  
  "She lets a lover, a child, live. Maybe spares a few dozen close kin, all exiled."
  
  "And the rest?"
  
  "The rest die," Hofsha said.
  
  "And these people you speak to, they agree to that? They give up the lives of their entire countries to save a few dozen close kin?"
  
  "The first few didn't," she said, "the others learned. You know what choice to make."
  
  "I know what choice you'd like me to make, and they are entirely different things."
  
  Hofsha exhaled, sending out a puff of breath into the air. She seemed to marvel at it as it dissipated. "Shall I tell you a little story, Kai?"
  
  "I'm not fond of stories."
  
  "That's not what I heard. I heard you have a love of a fine tale from The Book of Oma. That's what it's called here, isn't it? Oma's Book. Ours is The Book of Dhai."
  
  "Why spare me?" he said. "You sent people here to kill many others, and you're asking after Yisaoh, but you haven't killed me. Why?"
  
  "I'm only telling you what my Empress bid." She pulled something from the deep pocket of her coat – a soft, floppy hat. She pulled it on. If not for the dark color, and her somber attire, and the substance of her message, it might look ridiculous.
  
  "Good day, Kai. I wish you the best." She trotted down the steps, paused at the bottom, and looked back. "I'll say this. I've watched a good many people die in my time, and seen a lot of lovely places burn. I'd hate to see you gutted out here, and all these lovely gardens turned to dust." She began to whistle.
  
  Ahkio watched until the mist swallowed her.
  
  In the temples, they taught a class each year on strategy and tactics, mostly based on records of the final battles the Dhai fought with the Saiduan. Those fights were bitter ones. The Dhai ate one another not merely as a show of reverence, but as a means of survival.
  
  They had been forced to do any number of terrified and desperate things, at the end, because they knew their fate. They would be routed, and their children turned into slaves. It was a known end. They fought hard because they knew there was no other alternative they could live with.
  
  Ahkio went to the rail and listened to the eerie murmuring of the river below, made alien in its cadence by the fog. The Tai Mora were like that. Some distorted version of themselves. Not real people. Not truly Dhai. If they were Dhai, they would not propose to slaughter them all in their beds.
  
  Ahkio left the rail and headed back to the temple, in search of Liaro. Not for council, but for the comfort of one known. He wanted someone to take him into his arms and tell him there was some other choice not constructed by a foreign army, even if he was too old to believe in children's stories.