I sent Andraescav into the shrine with the princess. He had been cheated out of his time with “the boss,” so I thought that a few hours spent in the company of the dead Sarangbau kings might make him feel better about the world. If he could tear his attention away from Iyedraeka. Vaenahma, as always, chose to stay outside. They had no great love of shrines, and no ancestors to visit there anyway. I let the other guards choose whether they wanted to go in or stay outside with me. The shrine only has one way in or out. We had to guard both the entrance and the royal personage. And many members of my little guard had no desire to go cavorting with their forebears.

  I slipped inside of course, just to make sure that everyone was at their posts and standing straight and looking like a guard should look. The oracles gazed at me from the shadows. Two stood at the end of a long tunnel, singing into the darkness of the inner sanctum. I found myself shivering slightly, but went along the tunnel to them. I did not like passing the oracles. They stood like statues, only their mouths moving, and their elaborate headdresses glittered in the light of the single bejeweled lantern that hung from the tunnel’s ceiling. Still, I paused as I stepped between them. The deep darkness stretched out ahead of me, and I had no desire to go into it. I did so anyway, and felt the dead flutter about me like moths. I took ten paces in and a voice said “Hold.”

  “Andraescav,” I said. “Is the princess here?”

  “A step in front of you, Captain. All is well.”

  I reached out a hand and moved it carefully through the darkness. When my fingers brushed the princess’s hair a shiver went up my arm. I could not convince my body that I wasn’t touching a ghost. But she spoke to me, and there was a smile in her voice.

  “All is well, Captain. You can go back outside.”

  So I did. Martiveht was loitering by the shrine entrance, which was not surprising, as Sasturi only enter shrines when they’re carrying a ghost that they need to deposit. In general the oracles hate them and they hate the oracles, although you sometimes find a Sasturi who is working directly for one of the shrines. But these renegades are shunned by the rest of their kind, as they should be. They are all assumed to be Poison Sasturi, and under the influence of Basokume. You have to be very careful in assessing the threads of influence that run through the world. Libreigia hates Hasra and Yenceyan, and those two cities hate Libreigia. Everyone hates and fears Basokume. Little kingdoms like Rahasabahst spend their days in awe of these powers and struggle to maintain their independence. A guard captain must be aware of this, although, fortunately, we can generally avoid getting too entangled in politics. But these threads also run through the different orders of society. Poison Sasturi hate the Weavers, and both groups hate the Scribe Sasturi. As if hatred is a river, and each group is a waterwheel, drawing its power from the hurrying water.

  There’s a kind of festival atmosphere that springs up around a shrine. Rahasabahst Shrine is not nearly as grand as the shrines in Libreigia or Hasra, or even Raensapal. It does have a charming little waterfall, and a nice wide area along the stream where the vendors sell savory meats and salted sweets from their little carts. On that day a tinker had claimed the best spot and was doing brisk business. The shrine market was very crowded. The air smelled of water dripping off of plants, and the cliffside was dewy with moss and lichen. Ferns gathered on the hillsides around us. From my vantage point, sitting on the little stone outcropping beside the shrine entrance, I could see all the way to the end of the market, and every delightful scent came curling up to me.

  The slave boy, Cloehen, had taken his elephant to a little paddock and it was drinking from the stream and bullying the horses and hill ponies that gathered around it. Cloehen didn’t seem to think that it needed his tending, for he came up the trail to us, and when he arrived he had a big sanmatra leaf that was loaded with a wonderful smelling curry. I shared it with Martiveht. We hadn’t said much to each other until that moment, but it’s hard to remain cold and distant when you’re both dipping your fingers into curry and staining your cuticles yellow. She had square and active looking hands, her skin calloused from all of her weaving.

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  “I suppose it’s a bit like being a guardsman,” I said, chewing thoughtfully, my teeth penetrating the skin of a bloated raisin.

  “What is?” she asked.

  “Being Sasturi. You have your tools, just like us.”

  “You have weapons.”

  “A weapon is just a tool. You only need to use it when something is broken.”

  Her gaze wandered down to the tinker’s cart. “Some tools are used to create things.”

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose a weapon is used to create havoc.”

  I looked where she was looking. A man in a cloak was speaking with the tinker. There was something about the set of his shoulders that was very familiar to me. He seemed to know that I was there. He was deliberately keeping his back to me.

  I glanced at Dursehl, one of my guards, and nodded to the man. “Why don’t you go down there and talk to that fellow,” I suggested. “See if he’s getting a good deal on whatever he’s trying to buy. Maybe ask him if he wouldn’t like to view the natural beauty of this here waterfall.”

  Dursehl was an old hand. Not a smart man, but crafty in his way. He always wore a peaked cap, even though it wasn’t regulation. But no one could complain about it, because the old queen mother, our Poritifahr’s ma, had given it to him after he fetched her rubies out of a cesspool. A kindness, really, as his wading around in shit would have given him a nickname and a reason for constant teasing among the guard. The cap had distracted us, and the fact that the dowager had given it to him had silenced our mockery.

  He slumped down the trail, pushing his way through the pilgrims who were coming up it. Corvee time is always busy, everywhere. Men come down to work, and they bring their whole families, and the old grandmas take the opportunity to go and visit their ancestors. Of course, they were bottlenecking around the entrance to the shrine, where a stern-faced oracle told them that they’d have to wait until her royal highness was done communing with the dead.

  We watched as Dursehl came up to the man. The man turned his face towards Dursehl, and Dursehl hunched his shoulders and said something to him. The man’s face was still shadowed by the side of his hood. They exchanged some words. Then Dursehl came slumping back up to us.

  “You seem to have failed in your mission,” I commented, sucking the last of the curry from my fingers.

  “He’s just a woodcutter from up by Taokeihla.”

  “Awful nice cloak for a woodcutter. Must be hot, too. It’s a warm day.”

  Dursehl wouldn’t meet my eye. He shrugged. I was annoyed, so I ordered him to join Andraescav in the shrine. That made him look at me. A sour, poisonous look. He had never said as much, but I had assumed that there was some bad blood between him and the ancestral ghosts of his family. He never went into the shrine if he could help it.

  Once he was gone, I turned to Cloehen, who was still hanging about. He had removed a sticky bun from the grubby sleeve of his robe and was chomping on it, ignoring the lint that clung to the glaze along with the nuts and raisins. “Where did you get the money to buy us lunch?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. I supposed that he must get a kickback from the boys who collected elephant dung for the papermakers. Or, more likely, he simply stole. My hand slipped into the sleeve of my robe to my coin purse, which was, fortunately, still there.

  “Well,” I said, “I need that man to turn around so that I can get a good look at him. A copper coin if you get him to do that.”

  Cloehen wiped his sticky fingers on his robe and nodded. He was very swift, going down the trail to the tinker’s cart. And once there his solution to the problem was simple. He slammed into the man and sent him sprawling into the dirt. The man sprang up, enraged, and I saw his face. He glanced up and saw me. We regarded each other over the tops of the food stalls and the heads of the pilgrims. Pertrahn, my old compatriot. Beater of boys and ranger for the king.

  When Might a Hero Find His Rest. If you want to read the little world-building stories I'm writing as I go along, go to my Patreon page.

  Copyright KPB Stevens, 2025

  A Hidden Sasturi

  from The Archivist’s Table Book, Iteration 85, written by Huen Molvi, Archivist of Haunts and Scribbles, in the year 899