text: Heat and darkness. Roh saw the world in bands of color: blue lavender sky, the white slash of the tundra, a yellow wrap against a woman's brown skin. Voices in Dhai, and then not-Dhai. It was a language so close he felt he must know it. Maybe he didn't understand it because he was stuck in some kind of dream. Some nightmare.
  
  He thought ascending to Sina would be faster and less confusing. But the journey continued while he shook and sweated and screamed at bulky violet apparitions bleeding great gouts of orange light from their mouths.
  
  When his fever broke, he was unsure of the season. He wasn't even certain where he was, until he heard one of his captors say, "Caisau." They were so far north that seasons felt meaningless. All he knew was that most of the snow was gone. It persisted only in rotten patches in the shade of stunted undergrowth. He saw no trees this far north, but the implacable tundra was gone, too, replaced by jagged pillars of stone that snarled up from the rocky ground like the teeth of some band of snarling animals. He knew they were in Caisau because it was the only word that his captors spoke that he understood.
  
  Roh spent a long time trying to work out their language every night, peering at their mouths and gestures. It was close enough to Dhai that he should have taken to it easily, but some terrible thing in him had shifted, and now the world looked very dark, and every task seemed difficult. Even though the days were absurdly long, he found it hard to wake up in the morning before he was kicked. He wanted to sleep forever.
  
  The first time they tried to humiliate him, throwing stones at him until he took off his clothes and ran from them as they wanted; too weak to go far and easy to capture again, he cried when they caught him and beat him. It should have been easy to fight them, if he had a full stomach and Para at his call – but Para was lost to him, and he was so weak and exhausted he could barely lift his head most days. Whatever sickness had burned through him, it took much of his strength with it, and the pace they kept did not let him recover properly.
  
  Caisau rose up from the snarled pillars of the rocky landscape, a massive living hold so breathtaking that even Roh – in his depressed, exhausted state – felt a surge of awe. Caisau, once called Roasandara, the seat of the Dhai two thousand years before. It was like stepping into some history book. They broke through the forest of pillars and onto a wide bowl of stone like a shallow crater. Caisau was made of dozens of linked domes and spiraling towers that encircled a central dome so great it seemed to touch the sky. The skin above the great red sandstone walls was blue-green, and shimmered like the skin of the Dhai temples. Far past the vastness of Caisau, he saw the sea, still bobbing with great icebergs, and a harbor filled with bone boats that looked like crooked finger bones.
  
  Around the walls of the hold were artisan houses, merchants' stalls, and homes made from the same brown stone as the jutting pillars. For a city the size of Caisau, it did not seem very busy. As they moved through the great main streets, tiled in red stone, he saw why – there were no Saiduan here. They were all Tai Mora. A few looked up as their party passed, but most ignored them, faces open and boisterous. Roh had only seen the worst of their soldiers, but these were clearly civilians, or at least soldiers out of armor, and the way they laughed and carried on business brought tears to his eyes because it was like walking through some other world where the Dhai had never lost Caisau.
  
  The Tai Mora had come home.
  
  His captors brought him through the great shuttered eyes of the round gates. He kept thinking he would see signs of Dhai culture here, some art style or architecture that he recognized, but the fortress was completely foreign to him except for the living skin of it. Massive creatures carved from red stone and smoothed nearly featureless by wind and time leered at him from the walls. Some of the frescos had clearly been defaced and redone. They carried stories of Saiduan battles, not Dhai ones.
  
  They passed into a foyer so high it made Roh dizzy to gaze up at it. The ceiling was patterned in green and blue geometric shapes, faced with mirrors that spilled light from its windows all across the floor.
  
  His captors conferred with a tall, regal woman in a bulky fur lined coat stitched in silver. She sat behind a bronze podium speaking to two pages. They argued for some time. The woman peered around them at Roh.
  
  The woman was Tai Mora, but the pages or servants or assistants or whatever they were didn't look like Tai Mora. They were finer featured, paler, with brown hair and yellow eyes.
  
  "We'll wait here a few minutes," one of his captors, the broad, pocked-faced woman they called Kosoli, said.
  
  "Longer than that," the man, Borasau, said.
  
  The group of them sat against the far wall on a ring of benches. The little brown-haired assistants brought them tea and sweet cakes. Roh was starving, and they let him eat. He hated that he was so grateful for it.
  
  An hour passed, maybe two, before one of the servants came back and called them further up into the hold.
  
  They climbed through broad, open halls filled with light. How the hold could be so filled with light and still so warm, Roh was uncertain. Servants and official-looking people moved past them. He passed great libraries, most of them empty. The empty libraries were the only sign that there had been any sort of violence or upset here at all. The Tai Mora had held Caisau for nearly two years now, and must have cleaned up much of it after the invasion.
  
  The assistant came to a great glass door. The light was so bright that Roh squinted. This time of year, it would hardly get dark at all this far north. They entered a warm, humid atrium so vast it felt like walking into the open air.
  
  Roh stared upward. They were under the massive dome at the center of the hold. All around them were huge, broad-leafed trees and twisted vines with leaves larger than Roh's head, full of tangling gardens of flowers and fleshy succulents that Roh had no name for. He sweated in his coat, and peeled it off. The others did the same.
  
  The servant led them through the meandering gardens. Roh heard the sound of running water. They passed a massive waterfall poking up from a clotted nest of vegetation. It sprayed a cool mist. Little birds flitted about the flowers. Yellow and orange birds, birds with stalks for eyes, birds with great long threaded tongues that they used to sip at the flowers. Birds with claws at the ends of their wings. Birds… so many birds…
  
  They rounded the waterfall and came to the center of the atrium and a little park. Silver benches lined the walkway. A blue patterned walk made a large circular path at the center. In the center grew an enormous petrified bone tree so tall it blotted out much of the light. Roh gaped at the massive skulls. They had come from creatures with heads as big as he was. Bones twice as tall as him made up the trunk. The tree was as big around as six people standing side by side. He saw shapes moving up and down its length – tree gliders hopping quickly from bone to bone, branch to branch. That's how he knew it was petrified, not alive. It would have eaten them all, and him too, if it still breathed.
  
  Sitting across from the tree was a wizened old man. The servant came to him, bowing so low Roh thought her head might touch the ground.
  
  Roh's captors met him and they, too, bowed. As Roh reluctantly got to his knees to do the same, he met the man's look, and froze halfway into his bow. He coughed or cried, he wasn't sure which.
  
  The man peered at him with black eyes in a heavily wrinkled face, a face with just one expression, an expression Roh knew well.
  
  It was Dasai, his dead mentor.
  
  Roh huffed out a breath and struggled to his knees, because saying Dasai's name aloud won him nothing. He pressed his head to the floor so the man could not see the tears streaming down his face. The stone floor was very cool. He pressed his palms there too, and did not raise his head even as the man spoke to their captors, talking in Dasai's voice – his Dasai – but in the language of the enemy, the people with their faces.
  
  "Look up at me, boy," Dasai said in Dhai now, and Roh rubbed his face and did what he was told. He looked at the man whose head he had watched hacked from his body.
  
  "You know the Kai cipher?"
  
  "Yes," Roh said.
  
  "We have books here in the Kai cipher," Dasai said. "I expect you can get to work translating those for us."
  
  Roh wondered how they knew the books were in the Kai cipher, and how those books had gotten to Saiduan, but decided fewer questions were better. He would translate them from the cipher into Dhai, and presumably someone else would translate them from Dhai into Tai Mora. That was a tremendous amount of work for a few old books. The Tai Mora had one advantage above all else, and that was that there were more of them and those they had subjugated than any other nation Roh knew. Why had he ever thought they had a chance against these people?
  
  "Can you do that?" Dasai said, more forcefully this time.
  
  Roh had been staring right through him. "Yes," Roh said. "I can do that."
  
  "Good. You'll be bathed and given suitable clothes." He said something else to his captors in their dialect, and Borasau nodded and said something in the affirmative.
  
  Roh needed to learn their language, but it was like picking flies out of honey. His mind didn't want to tangle with them.
  
  His captors stood, so he scrambled up as well. Once they left the atrium, they chattered among themselves, seemingly in good spirits.
  
  Borasau pushed Roh away from the group as they rounded a turn, and told him to sit on a bench. "Someone will come for you," he said. He took a chain affixed to the wall. It was attached to a collar.
  
  Roh jerked away from him when he saw it, but Borasau caught him. He clipped the collar around Roh's neck, patted his shoulder, and left him.
  
  Roh shoved his hands under his thighs and waited. He needed to urinate, badly, and there was nowhere to go. Twenty very long minutes later, a tall woman wearing a long skirt and fur-lined leather tunic arrived. She had a high forehead, a twist of dark hair, and kept licking her lips.
  
  "Dhai?" she said.
  
  He nodded. "I'm told I should–"
  
  "I know what you're here for," she said. "I'm to get you cleaned up. My name is Vestaria. We can do this kindly, or madly. Which way is up to you. I'm going to take off this collar and replace it with a warded one. The ward won't permit you to leave the hold. You understand?"
  
  He nodded. He knew what wards did.
  
  "Lovely," she said. "If you struggle, if–"
  
  "I have to urinate," he said, too quickly. "Please. I'll do whatever you ask. Just let me piss in some place properly."
  
  His captors thought it funny when he pissed himself.
  
  Her face softened. Pity. He saw it in her face and guilt roiled over him, guilt that he had come so far, and done so much, but was happy to do whatever some foreign force wanted of him, some evil people killing his, if only they would let him piss in a pot instead of on himself.
  
  She clipped on the new collar, a leather one that chafed. It was too tight. Swallowing was uncomfortable. She led him to a latrine and he urinated sitting on it like a real human being, and even though she was right outside the door he let himself cry, just once, because he feared he wouldn't get another chance.
  
  Then she led him to a bathing room and scrubbed him clean like a child and helped him dress in new clothes.
  
  "You are no doubt exhausted," she said, "but I'm afraid you must come to the libraries now. It's time to earn your breakfast."
  
  Roh expected her to take him to the libraries they had passed before, but she took him deeper into the hold instead. Deeper and deeper until they arrived at a set of double doors, already peeled open to reveal a vast room.
  
  He stepped inside and gaped, for all around him, as far as he could see, were shelves and shelves of books. And, at the center of the room, milling about the shelves, were hundreds of collared slaves like him, not just Dhai but other people, too, from Dorinah and Tordin and Aaldia, and maybe other places he hadn't heard of. Roh turned to Vestaria, trying to form a question.
  
  "The ciphered books are here," she said, leading him to a table already occupied by three other slaves, all Dhai. "These have worked on them for some time, but they were not as close to the Kai. I do hope you're telling the truth, boy, because there is much work to do."
  
  The table was stacked with at least a hundred and fifty tomes, great things bound in green and black leather, each as thick as his palm was wide.
  
  "All of these…?" Roh said.
  
  She patted the top of the nearest stack. "Two thousand years of Kais kept records here," she said. "Let's hope for your sake that the Kai cipher hasn't changed much. Get to work."
  
  She walked off.
  
  Roh felt he should introduce himself to the others at the table, but they did not dare look at him.
  
  Roh's hand trembled as he picked up the book nearest him. He opened it. And there were the familiar Dhai characters. He traced his fingers down the first column. They were nonsense words as written. He grabbed at one of the blank books at the center of the table, and picked up a squib of a pen. Counted out the letters as he would for the cipher, and wrote the first sentences in clear Dhai:
  
  We lost sixteen ships today, and whatever it is that's falling from the sky is getting closer. The creature of Caisau tells me we are too late.
  
  He laughed softly.
  
  All that time they worked in Kuonrada, and the Saiduan had lost much of what they needed during the taking of the first city, the first incursion. They would never have been able to unravel all this, though, if Roh had not come here, if Roh had not tried to make his own fate.
  
  Too late, Roh thought. They were all too late. He stared out at the massive library swarming with scholars, and thought how foolish the efforts that he and Dasai and Kihin, Aramey and Chali, had made looked by comparison. They had always been a hundred steps behind the Tai Mora.
  
  He pulled the book into his lap.
  
  The creature of Caisau.