How should she organize her edition of the Mage’s Guide? Floridiana was wondering. Should she keep the original structure and divide it into sections by geographical location? Or should she organize it chronologically, to evoke the gravitas of the Imperial Annals of History? She was so absorbed in her planning that when something stung the side of her neck, she literally jumped.

“Ow!”

Her brush tip went skittering across the sheet of paper. (Paper! Real paper! When she had time to really think about it, really appreciate it, she still marveled that she was writing on actual paper!) However, the problem with rice paper, as opposed to parchment, was that ink soaked right into the fibers. You couldn’t scrape off the ink when you made a mistake. All you could do was throw away the whole sheet. What a waste!

Not that wastage was an issue here – say what you would about Piri, she kept the place well stocked with writing supplies – but it still made Floridiana’s heart hurt. Her younger self, the one that had walked all over North and East Serica begging for jobs, and lingered inside mage supply shops gazing at parchment notebooks without daring to stroke their leather covers – that self shrieked.

On instinct, her hand had flown up to slap away whatever stung her neck. Her fingertips knocked into something soft and downy that tumbled off with a yelp.

Every time Floridiana thought something nice about The Demon, she did something like this!

“Whoopsssie, don’t worry, I gotcha!” called Bobo’s cheery voice.

You hit me! An instant later, an indignant ball of feathers crash-landed on her ruined paper and glared up at her.

“Well, you pecked me,” Floridiana retorted. She probed at her neck, but the sparrow’s beak hadn’t broken skin.

Piri was settling her wings in a most disgruntled manner. I didn’t peck you. I merely tapped you with my beak to get your attention, since you were ignoring my words.

Oh. Come to think of it, Floridiana did have a vague inkling that someone had been repeating her name, but she’d blocked it out so she could concentrate.

When in doubt, attack.

She fixed Piri with a glare of her own. “I was working. And now you’ve gone and ruined that entire page. I’ll have to rewrite the whole thing.”

Bobo, at least, arched her long neck over the desk and inspected the page with gratifying horror.

However, attacks had never proven effective on Piri. Probably because the crafty demon mind had already foreseen all possible tacks and angles, and had accumulated centuries’ worth of counterattacks for every scenario.

Well, if you’d simply stopped working the first time I called your name, then I wouldn’t have had to tap you on the neck, and you wouldn’t have dropped your brush, would you? There’s a clear lesson here.

Or maybe it was just Piri’s sheer, concentrated self-centeredness that was so hard to counter. She could twist any situation to be about herself.

And anyway, you’ve been hunched over that desk all morning. You’re going to ruin your posture. Your eyes are all bloodshot. You don’t want to get nearsighted like Lodia, do you?

Floridiana’s eyes were dry, and she was starting to get an eyestrain headache, but she retorted, “I’m a mage. I can fix my vision if necessary.”

Piri’s silence said everything it needed to about what a waste of magical energy that would be. With a sigh, Floridiana surrendered to the inevitable. “Yes, all right, I’m listening now. What do you want?”

The rudeness ruffled the sparrow’s feathers, she could tell. It gratified her as much as Bobo’s earlier sympathetic horror.

I said, I need you and Dusty to go to the slums to find our priests.

At least, that was what Floridiana’s ears told her Piri said. But “slums”? She must have misheard. Surely Piri had said “sums.”

Sums? Did she want to recruit accountants as priests? Floridiana wouldn’t have expected Piri, of all people, to care about placing the Temple on solid financial ground, or to want the Temple to keep proper financial records at all, but maybe she’d learned a lesson from bankrupting the Empire.

It was still hard to picture accountants donning Lodia’s embroidered silk robes, though…. They were on the flamboyant side. (The robes, not the accountants. Or maybe the accountants too. Who knew?)

Floridiana raised both of her eyebrows as high as they would go. “You want me to go around the nobles’ mansions, poaching their accountants? I cannot imagine this will turn out well.”

Nobles’ mansions? Accountants? Who said anything about that? I told you to go to the slums.

“The slums.”

Yes.

“You want me to go to the slums to find priests to staff our Temple?”

Do I really need to repeat myself that many times?

“But they can’t even read! They don’t know a thing about proper behavior, or worship, or – do they even know who the Kitchen God is?!”

Oh, I’m sure they know who he is. They’re Serican, aren’t they? Everybody in Serica has an altar to the Kitchen God in their kitchen.

“We’re talking about the slums! Not everybody there has a kitchen! In fact, I don’t know if anybody there has a kitchen!”

For someone who’d once been intimately involved in running an empire, Piri looked stunningly blank. She asked, in a tone of utmost reason, Then how do they cook?

“They don’t.”

Then how do they eat?

“They don’t,” Floridiana repeated, bitterness seeping into her voice.

She’d been old enough to remember her parents’ pinched faces, her little siblings’ hollow eyes, all the babies who hadn’t survived because her mother hadn’t been able to nurse them. Old enough to remember when they’d sold her to the performing troupe.

Huh, was the demon mind’s response. Floridiana was contemplating smacking her – not hard enough to kill a mortal sparrow, just a little spank to teach her a lesson – when Piri pronounced, Well, that makes it even more important to bring as many of them here as I can, doesn’t it? Off you go. Don’t forget the carriage. Oh, no, that might be too small. Take the wagon. Hey, Bobo, tell the chef to make extra for dinner, would you, please?

Why was it Bobo who rated a “please” when Floridiana would be the one engaging in the hard labor?

“I don’t – ” she began, but the words curdled under Piri’s stare. After all, she did. Want to bring some of those people here, that was. “Any preferences as to age or gender?”

She didn’t ask about literacy. The answer would be irrelevant.

Nope. Not so long as they’re human. I leave it to your discretion.

It should have reassured her that the demon mind trusted her judgment. So why did it feel less like trust, and more like Piri giving her a sash to hang herself with?

Dusty complained all the way to the slum. As if he hadn’t started his life as a broken-down nag himself. Well, ended his mortal life as one, anyway. She didn’t know, and he claimed (possibly even honestly) not to remember how he’d started his life.

“This is so undignified,” he neighed. And: “Why do the priests have to come from the slum?” And: “Can’t somebody else go get them?”

“If you don’t stop whining, I’m going to sell you to the dumpling shop.”

That silenced him for one whole minute. There were old tales about boy-emperors who got chased out of their palaces by evil lords. One even featured the boy-emperor working as a kitchen boy in a dumpling shop until his loyal officials restored him to the throne. The dumpling reference suited Dusty’s delusions of grandeur.

Then the horse realized something. “Wait. But I can’t change into a human yet, and these hoofs won’t work for wrapping dumplings.”

“That is correct.”

“Wait. So do you mean you’re selling me to the dumpling shop to help make the dumplings, or to be the filling for the dumplings?”

“I leave that to your ample imagination.”

Since he plodded the rest of the way to the slum in silence, she considered that a win.

The slum, on the other hand, was not. A win, that was.

Of course it wasn’t. It wouldn’t be a slum if it were, would it?

She was rambling to herself, she knew, straining to distract herself as they squeezed into a warren of narrow alleys. There was no line of demarcation between slum and not-slum. Away from the main thoroughfares of the capital, the residents and their housing simply grew shabbier and shabbier, until you looked around and realized that the houses were no longer houses, but abandoned warehouses and shanties with too many families crammed into them. And that everyone you saw wore ragged, ill-fitting clothes and had the dead eyes of the eternally starved.

An old man who half-sat, half-collapsed against a broken stoop had his face pointed her way, but it was unclear whether he registered her presence. Her magical scan showed him to be human. Well, Piri had explicitly left it to her discretion as to which humans she picked.

Floridiana tugged on Dusty’s reins to stop him, which he did, settling his hooves carefully into the muck, as if dirt and disease could still afflict him. Then she jumped down from the wagon, pointedly not watching where her boots went. She had to set a good example for the baby spirit (plus she didn’t want to know).

“Good day, Grandfather,” she greeted the old man.

His empty eyes turned away from the wagon and meandered until they came to a stop on her nose. “Good…day…mage….” His throat was so parched that the words came out as a croak.

Floridiana surveyed the alley for a well, but of course there was none. She should have remembered that, and prepared jugs of water before she came. If only Den were here! The dragon king could have summoned water!

“Do you live here, Grandfather?” She tipped her head at the splintered doorframe behind him.

“Mmmmm,” he groaned, which she interpreted as a “yes.”

“Do you have family to take care of you?”

“Mmm-mmmm….”

That was a “no.”

“Grandfather, I am looking for people for a job.” Too late, she realized that she’d forgotten to ask Piri whether the priests would be paid in anything other than food and housing. Knowing Piri, that bird-brain hadn’t considered the issue. “You would have to leave here, but we would provide all the food you could wish for and a warm, clean, dry place to sleep. Would you be interested?”

“Mmmm….”

“All right, let’s get you in the wagon, then.”

She helped him to his feet and onto the wagon bed, which was much easier than it should have been for an adult male. He collapsed into the same half-sitting position.

People were beginning to edge out of the narrow spaces between buildings to peek at her. Moving slowly so she wouldn’t scare them off, she approached a pair of children. They were probably under the age of ten, possibly a boy and a girl, although it was hard to tell under their matted hair and saggy tunics.

“Hi.” She bent her knees and leaned over so they were at eye level, and she made her voice as gentle as she could. “Do you have parents?”

The slightly taller child, who might have been a boy, nodded. The slightly shorter child, who might have been a girl, ducked her head so her hair hid her face.

“Are they around? May I speak to them?”

Another nod. One skinny arm came up to point at a woman with stringy hair who had an infant in her arms and two more thin, dirty children clutching the sides of her – tunic? Robe? It was impossible to tell what the ragged article of clothing was supposed to be.

“Thank you,” Floridiana told the boy gravely. Then she straightened and approached their mother, still moving slowly. “Good day, mistress.”

The woman’s eyes were hard and suspicious. “Ain’t nothing good about it, mage.”

Her voice held more energy than the old man’s, which made sense. She must be eating better, if that nursing baby hadn’t died yet.

Floridiana inclined her head in apology. “Good day” was an inane thing to say to a slum resident. “Mistress, I am recruiting people for – ”

But that was as far as she got before the cry went up. “It’s a recruiter! She’s recruiting! She’s recruiting!”

And people came flooding out of every nook and cranny.