38

And there's nothing. It's fine. There's no crooked symbol crawling across your palm, marking you as the False Icon's. Nothing like that. It's all fine.

You approach consciousness hesitantly, not sure if it might be some other trick of the False Icon's. But you hear voices and feel your body resting upon a soft mat. Cooking smoke mingles with the acrid smell of some kind of medicine. You still can't see, except for a hazy gray shimmer.

Back in Mexihco, the philosophers considered the False Icon not a creature but a great emptiness in the world, which the gods filled with things until only a tiny mote of nothingness remained, imprisoned by the multitude of things all around it. That myth is far from the stark Orthodoxy proposed by Byzantines like Stralchus, but you suddenly wonder at its truth.

The gray blur fades, replaced by the twisting symbols inside the False Icon, which are replaced in turn by the thin haze of smoke and what appears to be a thatched roof.

A man is singing. Day and night, someone has been singing as you lay sweating and delirious. You can almost understand the words. Did you learn in the depths of your fever dreams, or…?

You find the strength to raise your hand, but there's no mark there, only a few scabs along your knuckles.

The man stops singing and rushes out of the room you're in. You sit up and observe a dirt floor, thatched walls, a fire pit, a stone mortar and pestle, woven baskets and clay jars. One open jar gives off a distinct medicinal reek.

You examine your body and find you're healed more completely even than the limits of Byzantine medicine. What else can the False Icon offer?

You're well enough to rise and struggle into your jacket, trousers, and boots, which someone has helpfully left beside your mattress of broad green leaves.

Before you can orient yourself, a man pushes through the straw screen that serves as a doorway. In late middle age but still tall and powerful, he has the glossy black hair and ocher skin of the woman you met earlier, Keimia. He is similarly attired in a simple loincloth, though this man seems adorned for ceremony and adoration rather than hunting, with a necklace of gold and amber, and elegant, abstract designs of white paint on his face and shoulders. His expression is commanding but not arrogant, skeptical but not frightened as he regards you.

The warrior woman Keimia enters just beside him. Third comes Stralchus, his expression haunted. He shows at least a week's growth of beard, and the collar of his once-fine jacket is frayed, but he carries himself with all the regal arrogance of a Byzantine elite—similar to, but distinct from, the easy confidence of the man in gold and amber.

Last comes a young man dressed in some patterned animal skin, neither tiger nor leopard. His face scarred by pox, he looks away from you, turning to reveal a satchel on his back. At first you think the satchel contains an infant girl, but the black eyes contain too much intelligence. You remember that strange face working as you lay in delirium. That small figure is these people's herbalist or doctor.

The man in gold and amber says something, and you realize you can understand him. You remember voices as you lay delirious, but you are surprised and troubled by the extent of your familiarity with the language. You're not sure who you should address, though from the way Keimia stands before the man in gold, you realize it would be unwise to address that lofty presence directly.