The boy dashed down another deserted alley, disappearing around the corner. Solofi lumbered right after—and stopped dead in his tracks as he emerged from the alley.
In front of him, as far as the eye could see, was a miniature metropolis constructed of gray-veined marble, rough-hewn granite, and weathered wood, with man-sized pyramids, cylinders, and simple rectangular blocks erected along a grid of snow-covered footpaths. Topped by statues of ravens, the gravestones and mourning tablets were carved with lines of logograms that tried to summarize a life in a few lines of verse.
The boy had led him to the largest cemetery in the city, where many of those who had died in Pan during the rebellion against the Xana Empire, and later, during the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War, were buried.
The boy was nowhere to be seen.
Solofi took a deep breath to steady his nerves. He was not a superstitious man and would not be afraid of ghosts. He stepped resolutely into the city of the dead.
At first cautiously, and then frantically, Solofi searched among the gravestones, looking behind each marker for signs of his prey. But the boy had apparently disappeared into thin air like a mirage or dream.
The hairs on Solofi’s back stood up. Had he been chasing a ghost? He certainly had been responsible for the deaths of many during the war…
“One, two, three, four! Faster! Faster! Can you feel it? Can you sense the power flowing through you? Three, two, three, four!”
Solofi whipped his head around and saw that the cries were coming from a man who stood on the steps of the giant marble mausoleum dedicated to the spirits of the Eight Hundred, the first soldiers who had joined Mata Zyndu, the Hegemon, when he raised the flag of rebellion against Emperor Mapidéré on Tunoa.
“Four, two, three, four! Suadégo, you need to work on your footwork. Look at your husband: how he dances with dedication! Six, two, three, four!”
The man on the steps was wiry and dark-skinned, and the way he moved—at once deliberate and furtive, like a mouse strolling across the dinner table after the lights had been snuffed out—seemed familiar to Solofi. He headed in the direction of the man to get a better look, taking care to hide himself behind tall gravestones as he did so.
“Seven, two, three, four! Poda, you need to spin faster. You’re out of sync with everyone else. I might have to demote you after today if you can’t keep up. One, two, three, four!”
Now that Solofi was closer, he saw that about forty men and women stood in four rows in the clearing below the steps of the mausoleum. As far as Solofi could tell, they were performing some kind of dance, though it resembled no dance he had ever seen: The men and women spun like drunken versions of the sword dancers of Cocru; stretched their arms up to the sky and then bent down to touch their toes in some absurd parody of the veiled dancers of Faça; jumped up and down in place while clapping their hands over their heads as though they were fresh recruits in the army being put through an exercise regimen. The only music that accompanied them was a mix of the howling of the winds, the rhythmic, counting chant of the man on the steps of the mausoleum, and their stomping steps against the ground. Though it was still snowing hard, all the dancers were drenched in sweat, and the white mist exhaled from their panting mouths turned into beads of ice in their beards and hair.
Above them, the mousy man continued to pace back and forth, issuing orders to the dancers. Solofi didn’t know what to make of this strange drill instructor.
“All right, we’ll finish here today,” said the man. As the dancers lined up below the steps, he came down and started to chat with them one by one.
“Very good, Suadégo. The spirits are pleased with your progress. Tomorrow you can dance in the second line. Don’t you feel all energized? Ah, these are the new envelopes… let me count how many blessed faith tokens you and your recruits have sold… only two new recruits from this past week? I’m disappointed! You and your husband need to talk to everyone in the family—cousins, second cousins, their children and the children’s spouses, and their cousins—everyone! Remember, your faith is evinced by the size of your contribution, and the more people you recruit to spread the faith, the more pleased the spirits will be! Here’s your prize—it’s a negotiation pill. Hold it under your tongue before you have to talk to a supplier and visualize success, you understand? You must believe or it won’t work!”
He went through a similar speech with every one of the dancers, demoting some, promoting others, but always the chatter centered around the number of new recruits and money.
By the time the man was finished with the last dancer, who departed dejectedly because she hadn’t recruited any new members and was thus banished from the next dance session, Solofi finally realized why the man looked so familiar.
He stepped out from behind the gravestone he had been hiding behind. “Noda Mi! I haven’t seen you in almost ten years!”
After the success of the rebellion against the Xana Empire, the Hegemon had rewarded those who he thought had made important contributions by creating numerous new Tiro states and naming the men as kings. Noda Mi, who had begun as a supplier of grains to Mata’s army before rising to be Mata’s quartermaster, ended up as King of Central Géfica. Doru Solofi, who had begun as a foot soldier before being promoted to a scout for valor, ended up as King of South Géfica—where Pan was—largely because he happened to be the first to discover Kuni Garu’s ambitions.
During the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War, Noda and Doru tumbled from their thrones before the might of Gin Mazoti’s army and were cast out of the Hegemon’s favor. They had then drifted around the Islands as fugitives in subsequent years, making a living as bandits, highwaymen, merchants of rotten meat and spoiled fish, kidnappers, scammers… while hiding from Emperor Ragin’s constables.
“Look at us,” said Solofi. “Two Tiro kings in a graveyard!” He laughed bitterly as he kicked at the snowdrifts on the mausoleum steps. He handed the pipe of happy herbs back to Noda.
Noda waved his hand to indicate that he had smoked enough. Instead, he took a sip from a flask, letting the throat-burning liquor warm him against the bitter cold. “You’ve certainly put your impressive muscles to good use. That trick with the teahouse storytellers is pretty good. Thanks for sharing the tip; I’ll have to give it a try.”
“It wouldn’t work for you. They wouldn’t be scared enough,” said Solofi, looking contemptuously at Noda’s thin, small figure. “But your pyramid scheme isn’t bad either. How were you able to convince so many fools to dance for you and give you money?”
“It’s easy! Peace has made many in Pan rich and bored, and they crave some excitement in their lives. I let it be known that I could harness the energy of the dead to give the living good fortune, and many showed up to see if what I promised was true. The thing is: Once people are in a crowd, they lose all sense. If I get everyone to dance around like idiots, no one dares to question me, for whoever behaves differently from the rest would then appear as the foolish one. If I get one of them to say she feels energy coursing through her, everyone rushes to say the same, for whoever doesn’t would be admitting that the spirits don’t favor her. In fact, they compete to tell me just how much better the dance is making them feel so as to appear to be more spiritual in the eyes of their fellow dancers.”
“That’s hard to believe—”
“Oh, believe it. Never underestimate the power of the need to appear better than their peers to motivate people, a tendency that I’m happy to indulge. I set up little competitions, promoting dancers from the back to the front if they appear more faithful and demoting them if they’re not as enthusiastic. I give them prizes based on how fervently they gyrate and strut. I tell them that they’re ready to be spiritual teachers on their own, and have them go out to recruit their own magic dance students—and, of course, I collect a portion of the tuition they get. Nothing convinces a fool to believe in a scam better than turning him into a scammer too. I do believe that I could show up naked one of these days and tell them that only the devout can see my spiritual outfit; they would outdo each other in describing the glory of my raiment.”