“So you are not a Mede.”

He seemed surprised. I wanted to ask him if I looked like a Mede.

“I am Setran by birth.”

The Attolian shook his head. “I don’t know anything of Setra.”

“When you sailed from the Three Cities on the Isthmus to Iannis, if you had continued east you would have reached the city of Ghoda. Setra is in the highlands northeast of there.”

“How old were you when you were captured?”

It wasn’t as if I knew. I shrugged. “Old enough to have begun training as a scribe—I was on my way to lessons the morning the raiders came. Young enough that I ran back to my mother instead of on to the temple.” I remembered her shouting at me that I shouldn’t have come home to our fragile little house made of dried mud and reeds.

“I see.” Then he considered, the way he often did, thinking things through before he spoke again.

“The temple was fortified, then?”

My memories were a confused jumble of what had been seen but not fully understood by a child. I hadn’t picked my way through them in years—I’d just taken my mother’s words for truth. I would have been safe with the priests, she had wailed, as the raiders literally tore our home apart. I had blamed myself for my fate—if only I had run toward the temple instead of away—but when I looked back as a grown man, it was obvious that the temple had been no more secure. Perhaps its walls had stood, but that was all. At the end of the day, there had been too many other acolytes in captivity for the priests to have repelled the raiders. The temple had been overrun, the priests were dead and dust—not carefully transcribing their records and setting them out to dry on the temple’s porches, as I had been imagining them for years.

“I suppose not,” I said.

The last time I had seen my mother, she had clutched at my head as if she could hold the memory of me in her hands if she only squeezed me tight enough before she let go. She was taken with my smaller brothers and sister by one man, but I had been selected by another. She had told me over and over again as they led her away, carrying my youngest brother in her arms, shouting it over her shoulder, “Tell them you are a scribe. Tell them you can write.”

So, after we had been led away from the wreckage that was my village to a central camp that was a city of tents, I had dared to look my new master in the face and then carefully write my name with my finger in the dirt. Seeing it, the man had immediately squatted down beside me. Frightened, I had tried to scuttle away. He had grabbed me with bruising fingers and pulled me back. Wiping away my name until the dirt was smooth again, he had said in heavy accents, “Draw me a hu.” He said, “Now shee, now ur.” They were probably the only three letters the man knew, but I put them in the dust, and he smiled, showing all his yellow teeth. He nodded at me and stood up. That was all. But I rode one of the mules the next day when the camp city was packed up. I got no more food than my master’s three other slaves, but I did get an extra cup of water. None of his other slaves were from my village, and they looked at me with sullen resentment every time I drank. At night I slept as far from them as my tether would allow. I would never be one among them again. I was something different.

“And how did you come to Nahuseresh?”

Why could a rock not fall out of the sky on the Attolian’s head? “I was sold to the emperor’s agent in Ghoda and brought to Ianna-Ir with other slaves. Nahuseresh purchased me in the market there.”

I had been purchased as an apprentice and eventual replacement for my master’s secretary, who had grown old and nearly blind. Jeffa taught me how to keep records and how to calculate, not just with the triangular marks of the reed, but with the more elegant strokes of ink and pen. Jeffa was gray and bent and remote, as if his life had already drained away and only a husk was left to instruct me, but he knew everything, and he passed it on to me, not only numbers and figures, but our master’s habits and hints of his dangerous moods. All the wisdom a slave needs to survive in a palace, he gave me, asking nothing in return.

“You will go further than I did,” he told me, patting my head. “Our master’s father trained me to keep his records and little more, but he was an ambitious man, ambitious for his sons. They will be great men, and the slaves of great men wield great power as well. See how our master takes care that you learn other tongues? And takes you with him wherever he goes? He will make much of you.”

I knew that Jeffa hoped to be retired as some faithful slaves are, sent off to our master’s country estate to be cared for as he aged, but he died instead of a putrid throat. The morning after his death, I moved my belongings into his office alcove, ran my hand over his desk, and called it mine—though of course, both the desk and I belonged to my master.

Jeffa was the one who had warned me that I must be out in the sun every day if I didn’t want to grow blind as he had, that the dark room where we kept our accounts, the smoke of the lamp, would damage my eyes over time. In the years after his death, I tried to follow his advice, but my eyes had weakened anyway. I was by no means blind, but it was difficult to make out expressions on people’s faces from across a room. In the imperial palace, I hadn’t realized the Attolian was lying in wait for me. The other guards in the caravan had recognized the Namreen long before I did.

The Attolian was watching me. “You know, back home I have a reputation for being closemouthed,” he said. He wasn’t the chatty Attolian I had first taken him for, it was true, so I nodded politely and then sank back into my thoughts as the mules carried us along.

Koadester sits at the intersection of two of the empire’s great roads. The one we’d been on, going east to west, ran through Traba to Koadester on its way to Zabrisa on the coast. The other came down from the north, from Zaboar to Koadester, continuing south to Menle. The Ianna River is navigable only as far as Menle, but its source sits nearer Koadester where the meltwaters from the Taymets begin to come together. Those meltwaters bring the floods every year to the dry south, and the fertile ground around Koadester supplies much of the food consumed in the capital and by the emperor’s armies.

First off, we had no need to go into the city. We only needed to buy food and move on, but the Attolian had developed a tourist’s desire to see the Stepwell of Ne Malia lying within its walls. Our road had risen steadily after we left Traba and once we reached the broad open plain on which Koadester sits, there were more and more people traveling with us. We had ridden for some time next to a farmer with a large cataract that had turned his eye as white as the onions filling his cart. He smelled as strongly as his produce, and I’d been secretly relieved when he struck up a conversation with the Attolian, not me. Bragging about his city, he’d told the Attolian about the stepwell, the very one in which Immakuk had descended to the gray lands—as wide at the top as the forecourt of Anet’s Great Temple and seven stories deep, with stairs going down on all five sides. In all of history, it had never been dry. Royalty came to sit in a pavilion near the water on hot summer days, and Ne Malia, goddess of the moon, would tell a man’s fortune in exchange for an offering at her altar.

He was a most eloquent onion farmer.

I did point out that we were not on an educational tour visiting monuments of the empire like wealthy adolescents, but the truth was, we both felt safe. The Namreen were far behind, and we thought ourselves well hidden, indistinguishable from other travelers on the road. The Attolian gave me the same stubborn look he’d given Roamanj, and into the city we went. We stabled our mules at a livery outside Koadester’s walls and walked through the open gates in the dry, hot afternoon. The city stank, but there were cool spaces in the shade cast by the buildings. We had no trouble finding the well, as there was a crowd of pilgrims come to ask the goddess for her help, and it was easy to follow them. We each purchased a token for the altar from an acolyte in the plaza, a flat ceramic plaque with eyes scribed across the top and a circle inside a pentagram set in the middle.