Something big was going on in the monks’ village, Rabam could guess that even without leaving the cell he shared with Cuisan. The guards had changed, the old faces replaced by a smaller group of new sentinels. Usually it was rare to see the same person bringing the food two times in a row, but that day all of the meals had been delivered by one sentinel. One, not the usual two: even the amount of security had lowered. And they were young faces, or in one case old ones, a veteran that must have obtained some special permission from the abbot to keep working at her age.

It took him a while to realize what was happening, mostly because of the hunger that fogged his thoughts. He’d been on the brink of pointing his sword at Cuisan’s neck and forcing him to surrender his meal, but the threat of him calling the sentinels had always held him back.

It finally dawned on him that it was the day of the attack: that was why the monks needed all of the sentinels they could spare. Which meant that there wouldn’t be a better time to attempt an escape, with all the reduced surveillance inside the village and on the mountain’s flanks.

Still, he couldn’t push himself to act. He wondered how much damage he would cause by freeing his cellmate: what if he was a murderer, or worse, someone who had attempted a murder and could try again and succeed thanks to his help? What if, instead, he had only been imprisoned for breaking some stupid rule, like visiting someone he loved in one of the nine villages?

The door to the prisons opened in the distance, followed by the rolling of a cart. Rabam climbed back into the closet, bracing against the familiar pain in his back and joints that the half-crouched position caused him. Shortly after, someone delivered the dish. Rabam only got a glimpse of the sentinel through the crack of the closet: he couldn’t have more than three years of experience on his back. He left so quickly Rabam waited a minute before emerging, in case he had just forgotten something and was about to return.

“Only two meals left,” Cuisan announced while he sat down to eat.

Rabam looked at the mashed potatoes on the plate. His stomach growled, his mouth watered. There was no harm in asking which crime Cuisan had committed, and making him talk would mean not seeing that beauty disappear into his mouth.

“What have you done for being here?” he asked, sitting in the closet with the legs distended outside of it.

Cuisan’s eyes narrowed, spoon suspended over the plate.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I need to know what you can do to plan the escape. What if I need you to kill someone, but you can’t?”

Cuisan visibly paled in hearing that.

“I’m a good fighter,” he said, his voice uncertain since the first time Rabam had entered his cell.

He wasn’t a murderer, Rabam realized with relief. Still, there were worse things he could have done.

“Why were you imprisoned, then?” he insisted. “You must have done something, if you’re here. What if I ask you to pretend you’re someone else and you fail?”

Cuisan sighed, setting the food aside. Rabam made an effort to keep his eyes on him and ignore the meal.

“I’m not good at hiding, as you can imagine,” he gestured at his own tall frame. “I was caught investigating books I wasn’t authorized to read.”

Rabam inclined his head. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that.

“Which books?”

“About religion. The old religions, cloud people’s deities… Stuff like that. Satisfied?”

“No. There are books about that?”

He thought about Aili’s plan of learning about the ancient history of the mountain. Maybe her approach had been wrong: he should have looked into other subjects besides history, maybe there was some truth to be found in other kinds of books.

The man gave him an irritated glance. He reached out for the dish and the wooden spoon.

“We are monks. Of course we have a lot of books about religion.”

“Of course. Did you find anything interesting?”

Rabam expected him to yell that he wanted to be left alone, but the man’s irritation seemed to dissolve in an instant. He once again left the food aside.

“Yes. Cloud people believe in ten gods. Apparently because most of the humans they descended from believed the same.”

Rabam nodded, pretending to be more interested than he actually was. But Cuisan hadn’t finished yet.

“We have a tenth god too, you know?”

Rabam frowned, mentally counting the spheres.

“Oh, you mean Saia? If you think about her as a goddess, it’s no wonder why the monks have imprisoned y…”

“No, not the traitor,” Cuisan cut him off. “And I don’t mean our fake deities. I mean the true ones. The ones who created the mountain.”

“The nine gods?”

“The ten gods,” he immediately corrected Rabam. “There was a scholar that theorized the existence of a tenth one. She wrote that we forgot to worship them for so long that now they’re angry with us and will seek revenge. Of course the abbot at the time didn’t like her ideas, so the original text was destroyed, but the books I sought mentioned her theories in an attempt to refute them.”

Rabam blinked: none of that had anything to do with the escape or Aili’s plans, but he had to admit that Cuisan had piqued his interest.

“But you already knew about the tenth god, right?” he asked. “Otherwise why read those books in the first place?”

Cuisan nodded, but his eyes lowered. He suddenly looked uncertain about continuing the conversation.

“I heard them,” he admitted in the end.

Rabam leaned a bit forward.

“What?”

“I heard the tenth god,” Cuisan repeated, suddenly irritated again. “And you won’t believe me just like everyone else, so what’s the point?”

“No, I…” Rabam hesitated. He couldn’t say he believed him, but he wanted to know more. “Tell me what you heard.”

“Not much, I’ll admit. I was a sentinel before this.” He gestured at the cell. “And a few months ago, I don’t remember exactly when, I was guarding the mountain on Kivari’s side when it trembled. The first time, I mean, it has happened more often when the traitor started acting against us.”

He plunged the wooden spoon into the food, as if to stab it.

“One of my colleagues slipped, and in an attempt to save him we fell down together from a rock. The fall wasn’t particularly high,” he quickly added, seeing Rabam’s eyes widen. “We fell into a sort of depression of the ground that was covered in moss, so it didn’t hurt too much. We were down there when I heard a voice in my ears telling me…”

His pupils moved to the side, lost in a distant memory.

“‘Find me, my child,’” he said in a low tone.

Rabam waited for him to add something else, but nothing came for a bit.

“That’s it?”

“Yes, but it was the voice of a god. My colleague hadn’t heard anything, so when I told everyone about it they didn’t believe me. I returned on the spot multiple times, but I never heard anything else. The scholars of medicine said it was because I hit my head in the fall, gave me some herbs, and that was it.”

“You… Did you really hit your head?”

Cuisan stood, startling Rabam with his intense gaze. He retracted a bit more into the closet, hand on the sword.

“It was true. I looked for proof and I found it, and now the monks want to keep everything hidden by telling me that hitting my head gave me hallucinations and delusions. I tell them every visit that they’re insane, if they hope to keep a god hidden from all of us, but…”

“Wait,” Rabam interrupted him. “Visits? They visit you?”

Cuisan glared at him.

“Yes.”

“That’s perfect. We can use it for the escape.”

The man didn’t reply. Instead, he slowly sat down, to Rabam’s relief. He took a bite of the cold food, and Rabam’s stomach growled again.

“Can I…?”

“No,” Cuisan answered, then ignored him for the rest of the meal.

Rabam finished donning his appearance, stirred his wrinkled tunic as much as he could, adjusted belt and sword firmly around his waist. Cuisan was ready too, even if in his case all he needed to do was stand and wait by the door. The distant voices of the guards and the booming of the prison’s entrance closing were the signals they needed.

“Let’s go,” Rabam said. “Remember what I told you.”

Cuisan grunted in irritation. He really didn’t like the plan Rabam had come up with, but his grumpiness made the whole story he had prepared more believable.

He opened the cell with the keys he’d stolen from the guards during his fake escape. The screech of the metal made him grimace: it was loud enough that the whole prison had probably heard it. From that moment on, there was no turning back.

He extracted the sword and brusquely motioned for Cuisan to step out in front of him.

“Come on,” Rabam said out loud. “You don’t want to make them wait.”

“You’ll pay for this,” Cuisan replied, with a voice low and sharp enough Rabam wasn’t sure it was entirely a pretence for the benefit of the guards.

They walked down the corridor, Cuisan in front, Rabam standing behind his huge frame. It unnerved him that he didn’t have long hair anymore nor make-up with which to disguise himself. He didn’t doubt every single sentinel in the area knew his face, after his trial and subsequent escape. His only protection, apart from Cuisan’s huge back, was that they probably thought him long gone from the village, not still trapped inside its prisons.

His heart accelerated when they entered the central room. He gripped his weapon tighter to resist the urge to peek from behind Cuisan and see who they had to deal with. Especially after he heard the sharp sound of two swords being extracted.

“I need to bring the prisoner to his visit,” Rabam said, keeping his voice loud and deeper than it usually was.

“Oh, so the madman isn’t alone,” one of the sentinels said. “Good. I was scared it was another evasion.”

Rabam saw Cuisan tensing in hearing that nickname. He gripped the back of his tunic, both to steady himself and calm him down. He waited for the sentinels’ next words, remembering what Cuisan had told him:

“Your plan won’t work. The scholars come here in the prisons, I don’t go to them.”

“Yes,” Rabam had answered. “But the staff of the prisons changed almost entirely, and we can count on the new ones not to know this.”

Or at least, he hoped so. The sentinel seemed to know who Cuisan was, which was not a good start.

“A visit at sunset?” the other sentinel asked.

Rabam felt his heart skip a beat. There was no difference between day and night in the prisons, so he hadn’t thought about the hour of the escape, only the change of the turns.

He heard the sentinel step forward in the silence that had followed his question.

“Yes,” Rabam almost yelled, frantically looking for an explanation. “He had a crisis. He needs an urgent visit.”

He could almost feel their doubtful gazes scouring Cuisan’s face.

“We didn’t see you enter,” the other sentinel pointed out.

Rabam was prepared.

“I entered during the previous turn, it took a while to calm him down. You aren’t the same people who were guarding the door when they called me here for the emergency.”

“True,” the man answered, but the silence protracted a bit more.

“Who are you, anyway?” the other sentinel said. “And why did they send you alone to escort a prisoner?”

He approached, to the point Rabam could see his shadow on the floor and half of his face. Cuisan turned slightly to shield him, which exposed him to the other sentinel. Rabam turned his face, standing tall like a sentinel would, his grip tight around the sword.

“Calm down,” he ordered Cuisan, still holding his tunic with the other hand. “There wasn’t anyone else available. Don’t approach, or he might have another crisis.”

“I don’t have crises,” the prisoner shouted, gaining the immediate attention of both sentinels. “He talked to me, I swear. He wanted me to burn my bed.”

He stepped forward, but Rabam immediately raised his sword to rest it against his neck. He had to stretch his arm up to reach him, hiding his face behind it in the process.

“Calm down,” he hissed to hide his ragged breath. “Can you please let me through? I want this to be over with as soon as possible.”

After a few more instants, the sentinel who had stepped forward retracted toward the door. Rabam heard his keys clatter, followed by a deep rumble. The slightly more intense light of the sentinels’ common room on the other side filtered through the door, together with a voice that Rabam recognized immediately.

“And lastly, the attack will begin in a few minutes,” said Bades, the oldest sentinel prior. “So be ready to join the ranks at a moment’s notice. Remember to keep your eyes open, there’s still a prisoner out there.”

Rabam felt his stomach tighten, the hunger replaced by fear. Of course the meeting of the sentinels for the nightly turns had been anticipated to the hour of the attack, to make sure everyone was informed about what was going to happen. Of course they had left behind the most experienced prior, where he could both consult with the abbot and coordinate the actions of all the sentinel teams scattered around the mountain.

From Cuisan's hesitation, Rabam realized there were more sentinels than what both of them expected to find. He mentally cursed for not being able to check out how bad the situation was by himself without being discovered.

“Go on,” he said. It came out as a whisper, which he was glad for, since his voice was too fearful for a sentinel giving an order to a prisoner.

Cuisan stepped forward, allowing the guards to close the door behind him. They moved as quickly as they could, but it was more difficult than expected, with Rabam being almost on his tiptoes to reach over the prisoner’s shoulder and Cuisan almost having to drag him.

Bades was still talking to the rest of the sentinels, even if some whispers were breaking out here and there. Nothing alarming, for the moment. As long as the prior didn’t turn to investigate.

“What, now?” he suddenly yelled, right while they were stepping behind him.

Rabam froze, eliciting a grunt from Cuisan, who had to bend back to avoid the blade. Rabam risked a glance over his shoulder: Bades was still looking at the sentinels, who were avoiding crossing their superior’s gaze for fear of punishment.

He briefly turned, making Rabam’s heart stop for a second, then brought his attention back to the sentinels.

“Yes, a prisoner, what a surprise. Let your colleague do his job and focus on the task at hand.”

But one of them had seen Rabam. She was raising a finger to point at him with wide eyes. She had recognized him.

“I think he’s…”

Rabam let go of Cuisan and jumped onto Bades, grabbing his neck with an arm and raising the sword to his chin.

“Don’t move or I’ll kill him.”

He took the instant of stunned silence to observe the sentinels better. Usually only half of the ones keeping guard outside were armed, but the priors had probably deemed it necessary to increase security since the day he had escaped: at least one in three had at least a sword or spear, even if he could see some knives dangling from their belts.

He tried to drag the prior back with him, toward the exit, but the man resisted his attempts. Rabam felt a hand against his shoulder and turned his head, expecting another sentinel. But it was Cuisan, gesturing for him to give him the sword. He complied. The prisoner managed to get a better hold on the prior, and actually force him to follow them in their retreat.

The sentinels had extracted every blade in their possession, but they hesitated, looking from the prior to the man that was holding him and back. Rabam and Cuisan moved slowly toward the door, observing the sentinels: mostly young people and old veterans, just as the change of surveillance at the prison had suggested. They weren’t that many either, for the evening meetings’ standard, but more than enough to overwhelm the two of them.

“What are you waiting for, you idiots?” Bades screamed. “I’ve accepted to sacrifice for the village years ago, and you should have as well. Have you forgotten your training?” He struggled against Cuisan’s tightened grip. “Attack them!”

Rabam watched in horror as a couple of sentinels awakened from their shocked hesitation and extracted their swords. The moment one of them made a step forward, he heard a wet gurgle coming from Cuisan.

He turned, a chill along his spine preparing him for the worst. It wasn't the prisoner that had emitted that sound, but the prior. He dropped to the ground, and at first Rabam thought he had slipped on the blood that was covering the floor. It took him too long to realize it was coming from the prior’s throat.

Cuisan raised his bloodied sword and pointed it at the nearest sentinel. It was a young boy, younger than Rabam at least, who immediately let his weapon fall and stepped back. Cuisan kicked the sword toward Rabam.

“We're in a fight, wake up!”

Rabam raised his head without moving his eyes from Bades.

“Why did you do that?” he asked in a whisper.

“What do you mean, 'why’?” Cuisan grunted while he attacked a sentinel, slashing their arm and disarming them in the process. “You said it: move and we kill him.”

Rabam ignored the sentinels who had begun to approach him, sensing he was an easier target.

'I didn't mean it,' he wanted to reply. 'I said it to scare them.'

But it didn't matter: he had made the threat, he had given Cuisan the sword. Most of all, he had judged the man wrong: the fact he hadn't killed before didn't mean he wasn't able, or willing, to do it. He'd taken for granted he'd never cross that line, because Rabam wouldn’t either. It was so obvious to him, that he hadn’t even considered saying it out loud. He hadn't thought twice about endangering Bades’s life, because to him it was never actually in danger.

Or do you live expecting things to start falling upward at any moment?

A sword cutting the air too close to his neck made him jump back. He started raising his hands, about to declare his surrender, when the earth trembled.

While the sentinels recoiled all around the room, he stood without moving. The attack on Suimer had begun, and if the earth was trembling, something had gone wrong. Maybe Zeles had been killed, maybe the monks had plotted something else. Aili needed him, at least until her plan was over. Then he could…

He tried to find some sort of future for himself, but there was nothing else to do except return to the monks’ village and let them kill him for good. Nobody would have stood in the abbot's way if he decided on an execution. He had just lost Daira's support, his family's even. He despised himself more than when Mili had been killed, more than he despised Loriem.

He picked up the sword while the floor, walls and ceiling trembled all around him, the stone they were made of humming its threat.

The earthquake stopped suddenly, giving space to the screams. Cuisan was keeping three sentinels at bay, after wounding two more. Rabam's eyes widened: he risked being responsible for even more death, if he let him fight on his own.

“Please drop the swords and you won't get hurt,” he yelled at the sentinels in front of him while stepping closer to the prisoner.

When one of them raised her sword, he activated the magnet, pouring as much viss as he could spare into the pattern. The attack was deflected, and a couple of weapons escaped their owners' grip and slid onto the floor.

“The tenth god is here,” Cuisan proclaimed, laughing as he kept swinging. “I told you I was his chosen prophet.”

Rabam saw another sentinel attack him and deflected his spear too, forcing him to bend forward and pass under Cuisan’s next swing.

“Drop your weapons and nothing will happen to you,” Rabam said. He didn’t have the strength anymore to worry about his voice sounding more pleading than threatening. He was still walking in Bades’s blood.

He couldn’t save them forever: they were hesitant to attack together, which made them easy prey. Cuisan caught one of them in a swing while he was making a run for the door, and another when two of them attacked him. Rabam pushed some others away, and they let go of their swords screaming that they had felt the hand of a god blocking them.

More sentinels started dropping their weapons afterwards, and Rabam pushed the swords away from the ones who were still holding them.

“That’s right. On the floor!” Cuisan screamed, clearly enjoying himself. He was skilled enough with the sword Rabam could imagine he liked fighting a lot.

“The keys too,” he added, hating to be associated with him.

Some sentinels dropped the keys in their pockets. Rabam suspected most of them were still hiding something, so he walked forward, activating the pattern again at every step. He felt some tugs as a couple of people lost their balance. He reached them before Cuisan could, demanding they emptied their pockets.

Once the floor had been covered in weapons, he walked up to the door of the prisons.

“What are you doing?” Cuisan asked.

His suspicious tone sent a chill down Rabam’s spine. The sentinels weren’t the only ones that had to be careful around him.

“We can’t afford to have anyone give the alarm,” he said, opening the door.

He punched a sentinel and pointed the sword at the neck of his colleague. They were too stunned to attack, looking at the people in the meeting room with wide eyes as if in search of an answer.

“All of you,” Rabam called out, regaining a bit of voice now that the worst part was coming to an end. “Enter here.”

The sentinels obeyed. Rabam took the two guards’ keys before stepping back into the meeting room and locking the doors of the prison with all the sentinels inside.

“That was amazing!” Cuisan commented, throwing something at him.

Rabam almost let the sword fall to catch it: another bundle of keys, slick with blood. He saw Cuisan standing next to Bades’s corpse and realized he had searched the body and found the prior’s keys. His hand twitched around them, but he couldn’t bear to throw them away: they could be extremely useful.

“Now what?” Cuisan asked.

Rabam walked past him without answering nor looking at his face. He felt as if he was moving in a dream while he entered the corridor outside the room and walked on as if he wasn’t a fugitive, but a regular monk that still lived in the village. He felt Cuisan’s heavy steps behind him and resisted the impulse to run away.

“Why this empty?” Cuisan asked.

Rabam noticed it for the first time.

“They’re probably in the temple,” he answered. “In case they need to replace a god.”

His words reminded him that going straight through the village probably wasn’t a good idea, so he took a turn left that allowed them to make a wide circle around the area of the temple, which lowered their chances of meeting someone.

Cuisan stopped him to make a detour. He broke down a door to access the room on the other side, mercifully empty. A series of hair locks were dangling from thick nails jutting out of the wall. Cuisan found the one with his name, blonde locks that emitted a reddish light when curled. He stuffed them into his pocket and signalled Rabam they could go on with a sharp nod.

They walked on until they saw the cave of the main entrance. Rabam kept walking without thinking, despite Cuisan’s attempts to stop him by tugging at his tunic.

“Stop!” one of the two sentinels beside the entrance yelled.

Rabam obeyed, looking down at his shoes covered in blood. He realized he had left a trail behind him. Not that it would change anything, but the sentinels noticed and started to scream something.

Rabam felt something run past him and realized they would have died too, if he didn’t stop Cuisan. He used the magnet to push them against the wall and out of his first swings.

“Hit their head. Don’t kill them.”

Thankfully, he obeyed.

Rabam dragged the sentinels away from the entrance, so that someone entering wouldn’t trip over them. A voice in the back of his head wondered if he really was that bad a person, if he’d saved them. But he knew the answer: nothing could have changed his opinion of Loriem, nothing would have deleted what he’d done. He realized he couldn’t tell anymore whether his thoughts were talking about Loriem or himself and tried his best to focus on exiting the cave.

Cuisan was already outside, but for some wretched reason he’d waited for Rabam instead of disappearing into the forest like the beast he proved to be.

“So we’re out,” Cuisan said, lingering one step out of the entrance. “What will you do, now?”

Rabam shrugged.

“I’ll try to escape through the external forest,” he said, thinking it was a plausible answer for a prisoner.

“Away from the territory of the gods? Bold. I’m going to look for my god. After today, I have no doubt I’ll find him soon. Or he’ll find me, most likely.”

He squeezed Rabam’s shoulder, seemingly not noticing his startled step back. That was his greeting; a moment later, he had disappeared into the trees.

Rabam moved too, in a different direction but with the same haste. He didn’t have time to make his calculations, and even if he did, the sentinels had likely moved their outposts while he was in prison, if anything to account for the reduced personnel due to the attack. They would spot him soon, he was sure, so he only focused on not stumbling while he ran down the flank of the mountain as fast as he could.

He was already starting to relax, thinking himself far enough from the village to have escaped the worst of the surveillance, when he heard a shout.

“There! Someone!”

He didn’t turn, but the panic caused him to stumble and slide down a gravelly stretch. He ignored his hurting knee, thankful he didn’t sprain his ankle, and kept going in Lausune’s general direction.

He soon realized it was a mistake: the point of Aili’s plan was to prove to the monks that she was on their side, while making them believe that Zeles was stronger than they could ever imagine. If he headed to her territory, she’d have to either let him enter, betraying herself, or immediately turn him in.

He deviated toward Suimer. At least he didn’t have to worry about preserving Zeles’s innocence, even if entering the village would be extremely difficult with all the monks around. He was already overwhelmed by all the rustling and shouting behind him, still far enough, but rapidly getting closer. He weaved through the trees, expecting to feel the end of a spear against his back at any moment.

Something flew over the trees: too big to be a bird, too square to be a person. Still, it was coming from Suimer’s direction, so Rabam raised his hands and yelled: “Help!”

The thing came back, appearing again over the top of the trees. He saw a carpet and a person sitting on top of it. He stopped running and retreated behind a tree, suddenly aware that if someone was using magic around the mountain they were probably a monk.

Only once the carpet had gotten low enough to the ground he recognized the person on top: it was one of the two boys Saia had called her friends. The one he had hurt to steal Zeles.

Judging by his expression, he seemed to remember too. He steered the carpet away, and Rabam ran behind him.

“Wait, please! I’m on Saia’s side too.”

The boy looked over his shoulder.

“Are you Rabam?”

“Yes,” he could only pant.

The boy sighed and lowered the carpet.