“Ram?”

Something was shaking. It was dark. He couldn’t see, but something smelled burnt.

“Boy? Come on back, now. Easy does it.”

Ram belatedly thought to open his eyes. It didn’t make much difference. The silhouette of a human head was barely visible against the general gloom. The ground under his back and head was uncomfortable—but a weight on his chest held him down.

“Stay put, son. You got knocked out. Better not to move yet.”

Ram didn’t argue. His head hurt terribly, and the rest of his body wasn’t much better. He wouldn’t feel good off the floor either. He tried to ask a question, but forgot what he was going to ask as he opened his mouth. What came out was a slurred gargle.

“Might not want to talk, neither. We done sent for a doctor.”

“Mmm.”

“Don’t know what kind of crazy shit happened here,” Father said, after a long pause, “but you made one hell of a good show of it. You and the big guy.”

“Mmm.” His chest suddenly felt pleasantly warm; the rest of him still ached, but the area nearest his heart felt fine. There were no twinges in his chest when he breathed.

“Looks like a goddamn war in here. Maybe your mother don’t need to worry about you after all.”

He couldn’t see why Father was babbling. The warmth in Ram’s chest was spreading now, up his neck and down his torso. The muscles of his neck relaxed; his lower back stopped complaining. As the heat trickled past his eyes, the outline of Father’s head stood out more clearly, and Ram abruptly realized several things. First, he was nearly naked, with only scraps of his clothes clinging to his body. Second, it was much darker than it had been before. And third, his last memory was of killing several Misishins.

He threw off Father’s restraining hand and sat up. “Whoa! A whack to the head ain’t nothing to play around with!”

“I’m fine, Father. Really. We need to get moving now.”

“You think you’re fine? Don’t be a jackass, child. Your old man took a good few hits to the skull back when—“

“I’m not a child, Father. I’ll be sixteen in a month. And I’m not you. Or were you indwelt at my age?” His hand found Beshi’s hilt easily in near-total darkness. Father’s dulsphere was somewhere on his body, he could tell, but hidden. There was only one more he could sense, off at some distance. “What happened to the handmaiden?”

“The who?”

Ram was on his feet in an instant, and made for the nearest light. His boots, mercifully, were only slightly scorched, and he could both hear and feel fine shards of glass crunching underfoot. It seemed the explosion had taken out every wet-lamp on the hallway, and likely boiled off half the water with the residual heat. Whatever remained was dead, and would never glow again. As Father had said, there were a lot of bodies underfoot. He hadn’t killed that many with Beshi; the handmaiden’s fire had taken out several of her own companions.

Ram had been right next to the blast. He’d burnt off some hair, lost his clothes, and now had a slight headache. But he hadn’t thought a local haranu would consent to attack him in the first place.

He found the handmaiden lying on the floor, in the twilit space underneath the first intact wet-lamp he found. “Hey!” He knelt down, and shook her gently by the shoulder. She didn’t respond. He shook her several more times before realizing that she wasn’t breathing. He looked closer, and saw a thick dark line against her pale neck, the matching dark patch on the floor beneath her. And several other stab wounds for good measure, far more than needed to put down such a child. The smell of burnt flesh and fabric had masked the smell of blood.

“She okay?” Father asked from behind him. The scene lit up as he pulled his dulsphere back out.

“No.” He moved on quickly to the next prone form, one of the miners—another slashed throat. “Where’s Bal? And the murrush?”

“I sent the murrush to get a doctor for you. Didn’t see Bal. What happened to … shit!” He recoiled from the handmaiden’s corpse.

“Yeah.” He couldn’t think of a way to quietly get Mother and the baby out of the pyre before anyone found out about this.

“Shit!” Father’s curse echoed down the tunnels.

Ram walked around the corner to see Bal sitting against a wall, with his dulsphere around his neck, all his blades in their sheaths, and a blank expression on his face. He’d somehow managed to avoid getting a drop of blood on himself, but Ram couldn’t think who else might have cut all those throats. If only it had been possible for him to simply disarm the girl! But would that thought have even occurred to him?

“Hey. Bal. Time to go.” Bal kept staring at nothing, and Ram didn’t want to touch him. It was the same empty face he’d had when they first met.

“Ram, come on back here, would you?”

Father was struggling over one of the dead miners. “This’n didn’t bloody up his stuff as much as the rest of them. Give me a hand, now. Don’t reckon you plan on strolling out of here with your ass hanging … awwww, hell.”

Ram followed Father’s gaze; the murrush was clanking slowly down a tunnel towards them, followed by their host, Zasha zen-Tirnun himself.

He turned to Father. “I thought you sent it for a doctor!”

“Indwelt swords do not rust or tarnish,” Zasha answered for him, “and indwelt men need no doctor. A host is either destroyed at once, or recovers completely. You certainly look healthy enough.” He stopped to look down at one of the corpses. Zasha wasn’t an especially intimidating man to look at: about forty, average height and weight, balding, with a prematurely wrinkled face and baggy eyelids. He walked stiffly, like a man who’d spent blooms clambering about in tunnels, and paid the price for it now. All the same, he was, at that moment, terrifying.

For some time he said nothing, only meandered about surveying the destruction with an impassive face. At last he stopped, next to the handmaiden, and said in quiet, measured tones: “This morning, I had an emergency meeting with our lugal, to discuss whether your arrival posed more of an opportunity or a difficulty. We still hadn’t decided when Telul appeared, telling me there had been some sort of scuffle in the mines.”

“It was self-defense,” Ram said.

“I didn’t think you’d picked a fight with a batch of bondservants and a barely-pubescent girl,” Zasha said, in the same calm voice as before. “And I bear some responsibility; I shouldn’t have allowed you out of the house while your warrants were still the talk of the pyre. I was tired and careless, and I will pay the price. Literally. For the entire crew. The Lugal will insist, I know it.”

Ram looked at Father, but he didn’t seem to know what to say either. Zasha turned away from the dead girl, and sighed. “Some of the responsibility, I said. Not all. I won’t pretend that this isn’t aggravating. This pyre’s operating expenses are considerable, and mine crews take some time to train, the more so because they are all trained to work together. To say nothing of their handmaidens. But this can be added to your bill.”

“What bill?” Father griped. “You didn’t say nothing about that before.”

“Metaphorically speaking. I am not running an inn, and I don’t owe my hunzempu sister-in-law any favors, no matter how she tries to guilt my wife for putting up with her for half a kindling longer than she should have. If we grant your family asylum, it will be in expectation of some benefit for Dul Misishi in the future. Do you understand?”

Ram honestly didn’t, but he tried. “You want me to … give your pyre some kind of trade privileges, once we win Dul Karagi back? Drop tariffs on iron?”

Zasha barked out a bitter laugh. “I am also not running a tile parlor; I don’t gamble. Especially not on odds as low as that. Which makes me a very different man from your Ensi. I don’t suppose he’s told you what he plans to do with you?”

“No, sir. Do you know?”

“I have a rough idea. But there is a reason why we don’t normally indwell males, and a reason why we don’t allow that reason to be generally known. If your Ensi didn’t see fit to tell you, then I am inclined to agree with him. I will tell you that, unless I am very mistaken, he’s not trying anything that hasn’t been done before. He’s playing a new version of a very old trick. Sometimes it works. More often it doesn’t. Either way, it leads to extended period of uncertainty punctuated by violence, which does nothing but good to the metals market. So it matters little to me.”

“What do you want me to do then, sir? Start a war?” Shennai had said they were trying to minimize bloodshed. Not that she had shown much of a talent for solving problems peacefully. Uncertainty punctuated by violence did seem more like her strength.

“That will happen whatever you do, unless you simply turn yourself in. That would be an option. You can’t know how much trust your Ensi is putting in you; if you died, or surrendered, or decided to collaborate, it would be the end of his whole cause. He’d almost certainly die himself. And it would spell a much easier and more pleasant life for you, if you played it right. But you won’t be doing that.”

Ram had to work to keep the annoyance off his face and out of his voice. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand you.”

Zasha turned to the murrush. “Telul, you might as well do the cleanup now. Starting here, if you please.” He stepped aside from the handmaiden’s corpse to make way for the creature; Ram understood only just in time to turn his face. Zasha had to raise his voice to be heard over the ghastly crunching: “You won’t be doing that, Rammash, because I don’t want you to. And my wishes will be what matters, because I will have your family in my custody. Do you understand me?”

“What the hell? We’re here as guests!”

Zasha nodded sympathetically. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But many things in this world aren’t fair. Such as my having an impertinent little bitch show up at my doorstep with a pack of wanted criminals, upsetting my wife, endangering my reputation, and complicating our relations with another pyre. Life does many unfair things, young man, and we can only make the best of what is sent our way.”

Behind him, Telul finished with the handmaiden, and set to work burning the blood off the rock with his breath. “I would have to consult an acolyte to be certain, but I believe your self-defense has just cost Dul Misishi somewhere in the area of twenty gold, once lost productivity is factored in. Not to mention the nuisance of explaining it. Do you have any idea how rarely we manage to lose an entire crew down here? There will be talk. There is always talk. I would have been reluctant to simply let you go anyway, but now? You have a liability, and I will see you pay it back.”

Ram took several steps forward without thinking, his hand clenched on Beshi’s hilt. Zasha looked at him with mild curiosity, then added, when Ram kept coming, “I would be very easy to kill. Telul a good deal less so. Explaining both of our deaths would be the most difficult trick of all. What do you think would happen to your mother and brother, if I never returned from this mine? What would happen to you?”

It might have worked, if he’d only been up against Ram’s temper. But Beshi and the spirit inside him were jointly baying for blood now, and mere reason couldn’t hope to overcome all three of them. Father nearly had to wrestle his son to the ground to hold him back. “The bastard’s got us, boy,” he hissed in Ram’s ear. “Don’t make it worse.”

That did the trick; he’d never have expected Father to call for restraint. He still needed to take several deep breaths before he could say, “What do you want from us? Pay it back how?”

“Any way you please, provided you do not make peace with Lugal Jushur. Your family will be remaining here, under my countenance and at my expense, until such time as you acquire control of Dul Karagi—and reimburse me for my troubles—or die, or otherwise lose any reasonable hope of success. In the latter cases, your family will be of no further value to me, and I will sell them off as I would the assets from any failed venture. Do you understand me so far?”

Ram moved his mouth, but couldn’t seem to produce any sound. “He does,” Father growled.

“Good. Your family will be kept under humane conditions, free from molestation, but their access to luxuries will depend on your profitability. You, the girl, and the freak”—he pointed at Bal, who had only just ambled into view—“should have talent and wits enough between you to earn a respectable amount of money, if you apply yourselves. I keep accounts at major banks all along the Teshalun, and we can arrange for you to make discreet deposits there. If my wife’s sister happens to die under plausible circumstances, and my representatives are furnished with proof of same, I will count that as equivalent to, say, five gold.”

None of them had a word to say in reply. There was no sound save the crackling and grinding of Telul’s jaws.

“You think I am cruel. I can tell, just from your faces. But we are in much the same position. You are doing your best under a difficult situation you did not ask for, and so am I. My place here depends on my reputation, and you are an embarrassment. I won’t ask for your friendship, but is it too much to expect your understanding?”

Ram could only shake his head. Zasha looked disappointed, but resigned.

“It hardly matters. I have business elsewhere now. Do you happen to remember the way back?”

“More or less,” Ram gritted out. He could sense the firelight easily enough, and work out the rest from there. The mines had no shortage of exits.

“Very well. You’ll leave in the morning; I can move the next ingot shipment forward a bit, if it will get you on your way faster. I suggest staying out of sight in the meantime. Any more such incidents will not work in your favor.”

He strolled back up the same tunnel he’d come in. Ram said nothing, but he had already decided to ignore their host’s parting advice. If nothing else, he was going to have to leave the house to find Darun. She’d stepped out early this morning, and he thought it was past time for the two of them to have a very long talk.