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INARA STOLE DOWN THE COBBLES OF WSIRIN, SKEDI FLYING at her side as small as he could be. Mouselike. He had used some extra energy in his fight with the guard, but he had not mentioned it. Instead, silent and certain as an owl, he joined her on the hunt.

Yatho and Telle she had left behind to rescue the archivists who had been locked in their rooms, and get a message to Bahba. But Inara had other plans, and they hadn’t stopped her.

It wasn’t hard to find the harbour. All roads led down to it like drains from roof to gutter. All she had to do was follow the waters rolling downhill. Soon she was in the night market again. It was quiet now, folk changing over for the coming morning.

She had seen a shrine for Yusef in the harbour, but it would take an age to find it again in the dark amongst the hundreds. Surely a god so great would have one on land too.

‘ Where is the shrine of the god of safe haven ?’ she said in Irisian.

The person she addressed had on long, colourful robes printed in vivid reds, yellows and strips of purple, an array of golden filigree around their neck and turban carefully arranged on her head. She was pushing a cart in the direction of the water and looked at her askance. She had not understood.

Inara raked her mind for the languages she had been taught as a child, the patterns in the different tongues, the structures that ran all the way through the families of meaning. But Skedi tightened his claws in her, and the woman’s eyes widened, hearing the god’s voice in her head.

‘ Go down three streets ,’ she said, and to Inara’s surprise, she recognised the tongue: Western Harisi, her tutor’s father’s language. ‘ Turn right and you will come into a square with red blooms. ’

‘ Laquia ,’ said Inara in return, dredging up a piece of the language she remembered. Thank you.

The woman was startled a second time, but her eyes lit up.

‘ How do you— ’ Inara ran before she had finished speaking, though she quietly blessed the memory of her tutor, long-burned, and Erman’s joy in teaching her.

He would be appalled to see her now, sprinting through a foreign city with a god, her fine clothes ragged and damp, seeking out a shrine.

Check above for guards, said Inara.

Skedi tipped his wings and went up. At some point, one of the Restish allies would notice Imani had yet to return with her prey.

No guards, but I see the shrine. Keep going.

There. A narrow square lined with trees, blossoming their last red petals around greening globes of pomegranate fruit. Beneath them was a man in purple robes, sweeping fallen petals and leaves with a straw broom as he hummed a tune.

And beyond, at the end of the courtyard, was the shrine.

Pillars held up a portico of fine marble slabs, sheltering a dark doorway into the shrine itself. The pillars were delicately carved in Irisian style, the image of waves at their base, droplets of water rising like dimples to meet etchings of storm and cloud. A tribute to the god of change.

But the frieze above the door showed whose shrine this really was. This was carved in a relief of meeting peoples around a feasting table, wheat and grain carried in the arms of the other comers, a fire burning: haven.

Inara went into the square, breathing in the scent of trees and stone.

Cicadas buzzed around them as if they were trying to shake off the humid night, and ivy grew up the courtyard, half covering a long crack that ran around it which had been plastered over and smoothed.

These walls were also etched and painted with caravans of peoples, ships by the hundreds, travellers on foot, by horse, by cart, all moving towards the hope at the centre, the promise of the god.

The caretaker looked up, seeing her. Inara was sweating in her grandly layered clothes, her curls plastered to her head and neck. She was not used to this heat that filled her up, feet to crown, and she must look a sight.

‘ No visitors till dawn, girl ,’ he said in Irisian. ‘ The god cannot hear every prayer. It is not yet morning. ’

Inara levelled her gaze at him, biting down on what she wanted to say and instead saying it to Skedi.

I’m not going to let some pompous git stand between me and my family.

Duly noted, said Skedi drily as he swooped back down from the sky and alighted on her shoulder.

The caretaker cocked his head at him. He was an older man, white hair wisping around the long lobes of his ears, weighted down with rings of brass and heavy beads in shades of purple. ‘ You ,’ he said. ‘ I know you .’

‘ I travelled often with the god of safe haven ,’ said Skedi in Irisian. ‘ In his previous life.’ Inara looked through the arch into the shrine and saw carved feet in the dark, lit by a glow of lanterns. ‘ My name is Skediceth, and this is my Middrenite caretaker, an acolyte of my humble temple. ’

The lie was light and sweet, sharpened with Skedi’s own longing. His will stretched out to Yusef’s caretaker, surrounding him. The man’s recognition stirred a perfect, cherry-blossom pink.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said softly. ‘God of White Lies. There are records of you, but you were thought long gone, not like to return.’

‘White lies are more powerful than you might think,’ said Skedi, with enough affront that Inara knew he was less than half-lying now. ‘A promise is just a lie unless it is fulfilled. And Yusef made promises to me that he kept.’

The man nodded, feeling the truth in that.

‘We have no prayers and no requests,’ added Skedi, ‘only thanks.’ Only thanks. Just a little thing, a god to a god. A kindness to a kindness. Yusef would like it if you did not stand between us …

The caretaker looked at the shrine, then at last nodded. ‘The other priests are not yet awake for morning song,’ he said. ‘Be quick with your thanks.’ He looked Inara over more closely, taking in the fine cloth of her dress, but noting her bedraggled curls.

‘I’ve counted everything in there,’ he said. ‘So, watch any sticky fingers.’

Inara smiled and bowed to the caretaker, who nodded and went back to sweeping the fallen leaves.

Then, through the pomegranate square, she stepped towards her father’s shrine. Her breath felt strangely shallow in her chest, as if she couldn’t quite catch it. She reached the steps and closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, and then went up all three, and through the door.

Inside was cool and silent. It was also sweet with colour.

The shine of feeling, the energy and will that brought gods life and power.

It came from six great bowls set on a low dais of stone by the carved feet Inara had seen from outside.

The first was filled with ash and sticks of incense, burning thickly.

With each one that had been placed, someone had offered a love, a longing, a hope, a prayer, and it lingered, bright and shining, giving Yusef their faith and purpose.

The second was full of coin, bits of copper of a hundred different mintings, and gold too. Bracelets, earrings, gems.

The third held fruit, split open and drying, but around this were scattered hundreds of tiny cups filled with wine, adding a sickly, too-sweet tinge to the rising smoke.

The fourth was spilling over with pieces of paper and vellum, layers upon layers, tamped down so that more could be added.

The fifth was empty, but there were pieces of straw and some droppings.

Animal offerings – chickens, lambs and rabbits.

It seemed the Irisian government was not as squeamish as the Middric about offerings of blood.

She suspected the priests like the pirates would bleed them then use the carcasses for their own supper.

The final, the sixth, held hand-made offerings. Small statues carved from scented wood, strings of beads and notes of paper. One small bowl that looked full of babies’ teeth.

To Inara’s eyes, the bowls were aglow with the fire of faith. Pain, love, hope, longing, passed into gifts and laid at the feet of the god of safe haven.

Inara looked up into her father’s face.

The statue was of an oddly young man, carved in marble, but with real ribbons woven in knots about his neck and head, which reminded her of the safe haven tree in the Bennites, by the great lake under the mountains.

It was new, that much was clear; all that remained of whatever statue had been here previously, when the god had died and his shrines were shattered, were the feet and the hands, which were greyer and darker than this freshly painted figure.

Yusef was a stranger to her. His hair loose and coiled over his shoulders and painted in shades of reddish brown. His eyes were of inset ruby, but his nose, at least, was similar: sure, straight and strong, while her mother’s had a crooked hook to it that Inara had always adored.

Inara.

Skedi fluttered down to the statue’s left foot. There, half-hidden in the robes that draped the older piece of stone, was a hare. With a deer’s antlers and a bird’s wings.

There was no name on the carving, but Inara knew it. ‘Skediceth,’ she whispered.

‘Here I am,’ he said, soft in his return. ‘Here is how we started.’

Inara went up to the feet of the statue and touched the little carving. The proof of what bound them. Her father’s promise.

‘It is not just his promise that kept me,’ said Skedi, as if hearing her thoughts. ‘His will might have thrown me to you, but it was your gift that kept me. Half-haven. A shrine beyond a shrine.’

‘What if some gods don’t deserve a shrine?

’ said Inara, looking up at her father. An ancient god, who had got her on a young woman.

She thought of Satuan, condemning humans and gods alike with his hatred.

Of Canovan, his fealty to his mother, and his wife who had died at the shrine of her ancestor.

Scian, who was built on a human’s bones.

Hestra, and her unstable ambivalence. Hseth, and her human-stoked terrors.

Kissen, and the things that she had seen, the cruel gods she had been paid to destroy.

At least, the ones she had told Inara about.

White lies, perhaps. Or just brutal truths, aimed to challenge Inara’s path, give her some taste of the grey waters of the world she lived in.

‘Not all things are certain,’ said Skedi. ‘Not all things last forever.’

Inara sighed and nodded, then pulled a small knife out of her pocket and slid it along her palm. She grimaced as it bit – it did not get any easier. But then she let her blood drop, drop onto the slabs at the god’s feet, hiding it so the caretaker didn’t see what she was giving.

‘God of safe haven,’ she called.

Yusef.

‘Father mine. Recognise your daughter.’

Recognise me. Rise for me.

Would the blood be enough, just a few drops? But poor Solom had seen signs that the god was risen, that he was back in the world, brought back into shape by faith and will and hope. A great god of this new age of trade and commerce, a bastion against the wild, till the wild had killed him.

Nothing happened, but Inara held her will, not allowing it to waver, reaching out to the statue, to the offerings, not to the place of the god but to the divine within it, beyond it. Skedi sat above her, watchful, careful.

Then, after a long, long moment, she sensed a change. A scent. Green earth and rain, a crackle of woodsmoke and charcoal, so intense she could almost feel the warmth of a homely fire, the feeling of coming in from the cold to bright comfort.

Then the scent changed again, to the smell of polished wood and well-thumbed coins, to pine-pressed silks, and sweet, rich pomegranate.