“Sinoduke is what we transte to ‘repose.’ It is not quite a state of tranquility, but of absolute awareness. Of serenity in a storm. If you do not reach repose before you draw your bde, she will not come with a heart of living fire or lightning or steel. You must learn, then, to reach repose in an instant, amidst a maelstrom. So. Breathe, my little tiger. In…”

  Kratzer never seemed to sleep.

  By the time Kotora rose, he’d already eaten breakfast and prepared their horses. When he retired, the northerner was preoccupied drawing by candlelight or disappearing for hour-long smoke breaks that he returned from without the telltale miasma of nicotine. He joked often, smiled more, wiled away the aimless, meandering monotony with the tune of his voice or a flute-like instrument made of horn he’d stowed in a saddlebag, and the next few days passed pleasantly in their peculiar partnership. Though Kotora found it difficult to reconcile this joviality with his fallen master’s ck of sentimentality or whimsical inclinations, whenever Kratzer came near, the sword-spirits stirred in sacred recognition.

  Tonight—where they shared the st, closet-sized room in a traveler’s hostel at the crossroads—Kotora came to awaken deep into the witching hour. He had no memory of what might’ve roused him but his hands shook and his skin was sticky with cmmy sweat whose cold cmoured in a skull spinning from sickness. He rose if for no other reason than wallowing in his convalescence did little good in body or mind, and, with the limp-shuffle-click of his unsteady gait, made his way to the empty tavern.

  Kratzer was there, in front of the hearth, lounging listlessly in an armchair with his back against one arm and his legs swinging over the other. A gss dangled from the loose fingers of his left hand a couple centimeters above the floor. His right delicately caressed a tarnished silver ring. It was engraved with a floral pattern that glinted in the dying firelight with some dull fake diamonds inid as if blossoms. A glittering, cheap little tchotchke. Yet he was so engrossed in its mesmerizing adornment that he didn’t hear Kotora coming.

  “I never thought my master would be so drawn to one so sentimental,” Kotora noted by way of announcing his presence. He put both hands on his cane to stop a few steps behind the chair.

  Kratzer leaned his head backwards until it was upside-down over the arm, peering around the back of his seat to look at Kotora. He closed his hand around the ring as if to hide it. “You ever hear of small talk?”

  “I’ve never been much for it.”

  “You might start practicing.” Kratzer’s eyes were gssy. He turned away and took a long draught of cheap whiskey. “I hate this pce. I hate the people and their flouncy, funny hats with panaches from birds they’re hunting to extinction. I hate the architecture, with all those gaudy columns and lurid luster and faux-academic epithets inscribed on every formal fucking building. I hate the smoggy skies. I hate the shit-stink of the endless fuckin’ farmnd. I hate the warm, glowing sunrises, and the stained gss windows of the garish chapels, and you know what I hate most of all? I hate how it smells when it rains. It’s bitter. It’s supposed to be clean and fresh and loamy, purified, you know, from the water. That’s what you get, after it’s wet and miserable for days. You get that smell. But not here. Here, it’s acrid. That’s what happens, when you build your home on blood and ash. It doesn’t matter how many flowers you pnt, how many churches you build. The nd, she remembers. She remembers the poison.” He paused in his tirade and held the ring up above his face, turning it between his fingers to study the way it shone. “I hate it here.”

  Kotora came to take the chair beside Kratzer. “You hide it well.”

  “Mm.” Another swig. “Bad dreams?”

  “Hm?”

  “Why you’re awake. Bad dreams?”

  “Must be. Don’t remember. It’s just as well.”

  Kratzer extended the bottle towards him in a silent offering.

  “No, thank you. I don’t think I’d be able to go anywhere tomorrow,” Kotora replied wryly.

  “‘S not really fair that you know my imodaki since our first conversation and I don’t even know where you’re from.”

  “You never told me where you’re from.”

  “No, but you know. Everyone knows the instant they look at my fuckin’ face. Nerceans don’t look like me or sound like me. Nerceans don’t look like you, either, for that matter, but you don’t really look like you’re from anywhere.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life in Nercea, aside the war, which I fought for this country.”

  “Your accent doesn’t sound Nercean. I’m usually pretty good with accents. Can’t pce yours. Kinda pisses me off. Not you, just that I can’t figure it out. I’m used to it being easy.”

  “It isn’t one you’ve heard often, I’m sure,” Kotora reassured. “If you hate it here, where’d you rather be?”

  Kratzer shrugged. “I dunno. Figure if I keep moving, I’ll work it out eventually. I want to go home. But Nercea made sure I could never do that, didn’t they?” The two fell into a brief, somber sort of silence, in which Kratzer drank another quarter of the bottle. Then he continued on. “I wish I’d’ve met you before you were all sick. I would’ve liked to spar. You must be handy with that sword of yours. How’d you do it? Go against the guns, I mean.”

  “More often than not, I used guns, too. Other times, I relied on shirsandai, near-impenetrable armor, and the simple, searing power of fire. Only some of these burns are from the gas. Many can be attributed to Yoriake and my feckless, reckless youthful abandon.”

  “Shirsandai. ‘The face-and-voice-of-lightning.’ That’s the first thing Cuán ever said to me. I said, ‘what the fuck did you do to me?’ while rolling around ignobly in the dirt, and that was his answer. My ears rang for weeks.”

  “It’s the first elemental technique he taught me with Yoriake, and the one I used most often. I’ve always favored electricity. It is the perfect union of metal’s honed focus and fire’s frightening passion.”

  “Yeah, well, just don’t use it near me. Or bond me to the bde again, first. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of that shit—or anything else from that sword, thank-you-very-much.”

  “I told you: I won’t draw her.”

  “Bullshit. If you believed that, she’d be hidden somepce, not on your hip. Doesn’t matter if it’s the left or the right.”

  Silence once more. Kotora didn’t have an answer, and Kratzer didn’t have anything else to say.

  “We should take the train,” Kratzer said after a while. “I’ll pay for it. It’ll get us out of here faster and it’ll be easier on you. I’m sick of this pce, and I’m sick of waiting to be out of it.”

  “As you wish, so long as our route doesn’t stray into Ablon.”

  “That so?”

  “It is.”

  “Alright, then.”

  The train station—situated in another roadside town whose income was rgely reliant on passers-through—was a gilded, gaudy building, second only to the chapel both men passed on the way in. Its peaked roof was covered in overpping red shingles and a sign, painted with an icon of a wheel to indicate a travel center, decred it to be the Aulebona Station, number seven from the epicenter that was Moudigrav. It was fashioned in the form of a cssical court building—arched windows, columns carved in spirals, reliefs depicting popur religious imagery—but the decorations were carved from cquered soapstone and the columns were made of more granite and painted resin than they were marble and the verses they chose were tasteless and meant nothing.

  Kotora followed Kratzer inside, and he took a seat on a bench beneath a bulletin board smattered with torn ads and faded wanted posters while Kratzer went up to the clerk. The veteran bowed his head and closed his eyes. He breathed in, out, in, out, in even rhythms that calmed the frantic pounding of an over-exerted heart. He allowed the now-Nercean-accented Kratzer’s voice become a metronome to his brief meditation and listened to the rhythm, while the words were lost into abstract sounds. They began in the usual upwards-inflected melody of Kratzer’s pyful speech. The clerk answered with few sylbles, terse, and it cut Kratzer’s legato lilt with crescendoing rests.

  Then the bance shifted. Kratzer’s voice shortened. The other’s grew louder, longer. This roused Kotora and he opened his eyes to see Kratzer gesturing in frustration to the paper bills he’d set on the counter between them, then pointing at Kotora. “Look, love, it’s for him, not me, right and proper veteran of your godforsaken country. We can’t go on horseback because your bloody war crimes broke his lungs so if you’d please just take my money so we can all be on our way, we would be much appreciative.”

  “You, Southerner!” The clerk—a cherub-faced young man in his twenties—turned to Kotora. “Keep your kizak under control and get out of here, won’t you?”

  Kotora looked first to Kratzer. The northerner’s face conveyed exhausted exasperation, not ire, though frustration had creased his ugh lines downwards. Few had the courage to call Cuán by such derogatory names but, then, they’d needed him in those days. Kratzer wasn’t in the privileged position of being a foreign emissary. Kotora took up his cane and rose, then walked step by shuffling step across the room to stand at the desk. “I’m Nercean.”

  The clerk didn’t have the dignity to hide his skepticism. “You can’t travel without identification.”

  Kotora reached into his front pocket and withdrew a folded envelope. He pulled a sheaf of paper out of it—proof of his citizenship and clearance to travel, with a blurry sepia photograph of him printed on it—and held it up. The photograph showed him in the bck, colred coat of his military uniform. “So we can aly those concerns.”

  The man turned sheepish. Militarymen were second in status only to clergymen, when it came to respect owed. “Oh, um—sorry, sir. We get a lot of grifters here, you know? Trying to cheat their way into travel. It’s nothing personal, you understand.”

  “I’m sure. Our tickets, please?”

  “Right away.”

  The clerk took the cash Kratzer had set down and reached under his desk to pull out two tickets, which he handed over. “Train leaves at seven tonight.”

  “Good afternoon,” Kotora replied, pocketing them. He didn’t say another word. He just turned, limp-shuffle-click, and strode slowly from the station with Kratzer at his heels. “So. What do we do for four hours?” he asked, gncing up to his companion when they were back to their horses.

  “I’m overdue a visit to the chapel.”

  “Then that is where we’ll go. You’ve been to the South before, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is it there?”

  “There, I’m a northerner,” Kratzer shrugged, “and you will be, too.”

  “A shame.”

  The chapel’s arches were carved from real marble. The rain had started to pour again within minutes of mounting their steeds and so by the time they arrived at the church, both men and their horses were thoroughly soaked. “I’ll wait out here,” Kotora stated, tugging Hikaru’s tether tight with his offhand and then going to take his cane off the saddle. The hitching post was situated by the church’s gate, within which was an enclosed garden leading up to the chapel itself, and though it was under a rge oak, it was hardly adequate shelter from the wind and water.

  “You’re kidding. It’s freezing. You’ve been coughing the whole way over.”

  “I’ll wait out here,” Kotora repeated, more sternly this time. He shook with such severity that he could barely get ahold of the ties holding his cane in pce, and he grimaced as he tried to get it undone. It was made no easier by the cold and his fingers’ numbness.

  “At least go sit in the garden. I saw a lean-to on the other side of the building, on the way in. It’ll be warmer.”

  “That’s alright.” He braced his wrist cantel to try to steady his hand.

  “Kotora.” Kratzer stepped forward and put his hand over Kotora’s, gently but firmly pushing it away. He untied the cane and passed it to him. “You cannot sit out here. Why are you so resistant to coming inside? It’s just a church. You don’t have to pray. You don’t even have to speak to anyone. Just sit down and dry off.”

  “I don’t care to. That’s all.”

  “What happened to dispensing with the ‘liberal, indiscriminate deceit’? Whatever it is, Kotora, I don’t care. I’m far from judgmental and moralistic, surely that much is clear by now. Besides, if whatever it is is so bad, it’s better to tell me now and get it over with. Otherwise it’ll be hanging over our heads the whole way and we’ve got another year ahead of us.”

  Kotora regarded him. He tapped his cane to seat it more securely in the mud. There was fear in the soldier’s eyes, in how they wandered over Kratzer’s face, wide and wary. This was not a journey he would succeed in alone. The apprehension looked wrong on the younger man’s face. Like it belonged on a boy instead. “It’s nonsense,” he said after a moment, shaking his head and dropping his gaze. “But I do not enter consecrated ground that is in the name of…anything that is outside the scope of my faith.” He carefully avoided calling Kratzer’s deity of choice a ‘god.’ “Not without a veil to hide my face, which I do not carry, and do not care to be seen wearing.”

  A veil. That was interesting, and not a tradition Kratzer was familiar with. “Surely your god won’t fault you for sheltering when you are so sick. Is he that unforgiving?”

  “I can’t, Kratzer.”

  “Okay, okay. That’s alright. We’ll go somewhere else.”

  “What about your prayers?”

  “They can wait. God’s surely not waiting up for me anymore. Here, let me get your cane for you.”

  Kotora passed the cane over, and he set his hand on Hikaru’s withers to help support himself while Kratzer tied it to his saddle again. “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing.”