I don’t like shrines. For one thing, I find them cold. They strike different people in different ways. My mother always said that they made her sweat. She would insist that we strip down to our under robes before we went into a shrine, and when we complained of shivering she refused to believe that we were chilled. “Nonsense,” she would say. It was one of her favorite words. Anything that differed from her way of viewing the world was nonsense. She liked the taste of silahntoa, so it was nonsense that my brother Draev did not. She preferred a soft bed, so it was nonsense that my sister Juelchami preferred to sleep on the floor. Her children were different from her, so we perplexed her. The whole world was different from her, and she either had to accept that her way of looking at life wasn’t the only conceivable way, or she had to declare it all nonsense.

  Yet I’ll tell you an odd thing. She isn’t buried in any shrine. The Sasturi came and took her ghost after she died. It was the first time that they had appeared on our street in a generation. No one who lived at the foot of the Bastion was important enough to have a secret that the Sasturi wanted to keep hidden. Yet they came, four of them, in their white robes. After that, we were shunned. I have five brothers and sisters, and the neighborhood didn’t want anything to do with any of us. In such circumstances, someone usually tries to keep the family together. The oldest sibling takes responsibility. But Torphel had no interest. He disappeared into the dice dens of Viepahrik District, and is long dead. An aunt took in the two youngest, and Jeulchami found work as a house maid. Draev joined a riverboat crew and disappeared to the south. And I, eleven years old and as blind to the secrets of the world as my mother had been, found a place in the guard.

  You might say that I am too hard on myself. I tell you that as we came into the darkness of Nhadtereyba Shrine I wondered if I should just stay there. The oracle was a stout fellow with no teeth. I could imagine myself doing his job. I have been told that I have a passable singing voice. He didn’t. He led us down the long and twisting tunnel, which was wide enough that I and the princess could walk on either side of Martiveht, supporting her. The sound of the river roared above us. Vaenahma had opted to stay outside with Malshaki and her two adolescent soldiers, and I imagined my lieutenant sitting beside the entrance, polishing a sword.

  The tunnel opened into a vast darkness, and the oracle began to sing. His voice whistled eerily across his gums. He was dressed plainly, having eschewed the spangled robes of the Rahasabahst oracles. I will allow that he might have been a good and humble man. But as he sang I found that I couldn’t quite believe his song. It named those who were long dead, and gave little vignettes from their lives, as funeral songs do. It wanted to summon the shades to our sides. But the ghosts of Nhadtereyba were as unconvinced as I was, and stayed sheltered in the shadows. I am no connoisseur, but Nolio has long insisted that the depth of feeling in a performance is as important as the tune or the words. There, in the darkness of Nhadtereyba Shrine, I understood what he meant.

  Martiveht was shaking, and the princess had begun to weep. I wanted to comfort her, but I also wanted to finish the work at hand. We took ten paces into that smothering darkness. It was very cold.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The spirit stone was somewhere in the expanse of inky black. Until that point I had never seen one in daylight, but I had been told that they glow, and that the colors inside of them move like oil on water. In the darkness of a shrine they give no light. Neither did Martiveht’s robes, for all their blinding whiteness in the world outside. The darkness seemed to take the betrayals and frantic worries of the outside world and shutter them away.

  I found myself thinking of my boys. I thought of how Thaeto had cared for little Nolio, when they first began haunting our barracks. Cared for him in a way that none of my siblings had cared for each other. Their mother was buried in Taeltaht Shrine. After she had died, Thaeto had led his little brother all the way north to Rahasabahst. It had impressed me when I first met them and it impressed me as I helped drag Martiveht deeper into Nhadtereyba Shrine. The thought of it brought tears into my eyes. Two little boys, lost in the woods, scavenging food where they could, trying to find their way through many dangers, looking for a place of safety. I had given them that safety. But what did I have to offer them, now? My troops had mutinied. The city was in revolt, and I was many, many miles away. I listened to the oracle’s song and hummed the tune under my breath. But I knew that I didn’t want to spend my days singing ditties about the lives of ancient pirates. I wanted to be back in Thaeto’s house, teasing my daughter-in-law and telling stories to my grandchildren.

  Martiveht was calming. Iyedraeka insisted that we set her down on the cold floor of the cave, and we listened to the silence after her ragged breath had gone still. I was worried that she was dead, and placed a hand on her back. Her chest was rising and falling, like a child asleep.

  “Have they left her?” I asked the princess.

  It was Martiveht who answered. “They left me.” Her voice was hollow, as if she’d been grieving. “Those poor boys. They never really knew life.”

  I had been thinking the same thing, but I felt a need to defend my lieutenant. “They would have done their damage to the world, and died in much the same way.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  I sighed. “I have spent my life cleaning up after people like them. Ordering bodies to be carried to the shrine. Comforting orphaned children. Telling rape victims that they might find a way back to happiness. The world is overfull of evil men.”

  I felt her wince. My hand was still on her back. “One of them attacked a barmaid,” she admitted. “He was very drunk, and it was like his genitals had seized control of his mind. Like a fever that radiated upwards through his body. Or a form of possession.”

  “Oh, Martiveht,” Iyedraeka said.

  “We cannot be prudish, we Sasturi,” Martiveht told her. “We know all the choices and perversions of the people we carry.” She shivered, letting her whole body shake. “I don’t want to remember that boy.”

  “His kind are trying to take over the kingdom,” I said grimly.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She got to her feet. We rose with her. “But I am more worried about the dog.”

  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

  The introduction to A Collection of Perilous Songs

  by Ipanhata Ghanpareek