saw nothing but a young man struggling on a different pyre. His apprentice, young Nico.
Ash sucked in a breath of air as one might do from a sudden, sharp knock. His gaze rose to the Temple of Whispers, the towering shadow wrapped by ribbons of windows lit from within. She was in there somewhere, the Matriarch, mourning her own loss; most likely in the Storm Chamber at its very peak, itself brilliantly illuminated. It had been lit like that for the last four nights Ash had been watching.
He blew into his hands and rubbed them together for warmth. Always he felt the cold more these days. He noticed that his left hand was trembling, though not his right one. Ash clenched it into a fist as though to hide the shaking from himself.
After a moment he sat down on his bedding and made himself comfortable before the eyeglass perched there on its tripod, aimed resolutely at the Storm Chamber. He lifted the skin of Cheem Fire and pulled the cork and took a short pull from it. For the cold, he told himself. To help me sleep. He tossed the skin next to his sword, which rested upright against the concrete hand, and the small crossbow with its double strings removed to keep them safe from the weather. He squinted into the eyeglass. Caught a vague passing of a silhouette in the wide windows of the Storm Chamber.
Ash wondered how much longer he would have to wait like this, perched above the city of two million strangers at the very heart of the Empire of Mann. He was anything but an impatient man; Ash had spent the greater portion of his life sitting and waiting for something to happen, for an opportunity to present itself. It was a Rōshun’s main occupation when not risking his life in the final violent stages of vendetta.
Somehow, this waiting felt different to him. It was no Rōshun vendetta after all. He was isolated here, without support, without even a home to return to if he saw this personal act of revenge through to its end. And his condition was clearly deteriorating.
He had been surprised when the loneliness had first settled in amongst his grief, his guilt. It had come on that first evening he’d found himself alone in the city of Q’os, after Baracha and Aléas and Serèse had left to return to the Rōshun monastery in Cheem, the vendetta completed against the Matriarch’s son, his own apprentice dead by her orders. It had been a long night that, huddled in his cloak upon the safest vantage he had been able to find of the Temple, this playhouse rooftop, with a bleak desolation falling upon him.
Ash lay back and pulled the cloak across his stiff body. He rested his head on a boot and locked his fingers across his stomach beneath the coarse cloth of the cloak. It was the first clear night so far in his vigil. Already the twin moons had set in the west, while overhead the Great Wheel turned as it always turned, as slow and fluid as a tide. To the right, low in the sky, hung the constellation of the Great Fool, with the sage’s feet hovering close over the earth. Above and further to the right of it, Ninshi’s Hood continued to watch over it all.
He found himself gazing at the stars that formed the face within the hood. Most of all he stared at the single eye shining hard with its ruby light, the Eye of Ninshi. It was like no other, that star. At times, it vanished entirely from sight while its companions continued to burn, only to return several hours later, slowly brightening as before.
To see the wink of Ninshi’s gaze, the old Honshu seers maintained, was to be absolved of your very worst wrongdoings.
Ash gazed at the Eye unblinking. He stared long and hard enough for his own eyes to begin to sting and glimmer in their sockets, though still he stared, willing the star to disappear.
He failed to notice his hand reach up for the clay vial of ashes that hung about his neck, and grasp it tightly.
CHAPTER TWO
Ché
‘The family hearth, friends, kinships . . . these are nothing more than the collective denials of the weak in response to the fundamental truth of our existence: that each us is driven by the impulses of self-interest, and nothing more.
‘Hence why the weak abhor accusations of selfishness. Why always they will offer charity