Archive of Our Own

It wasn't enough water after all. Jayavir understood the trick of this place's obscurity now: too tenuous a rumor to be worth supplying a proper expedition, too far from the last outpost to be reached alone by the sort of fool who thought there might be something to the stories.

But he could see it. There was a blur of green on the horizon, with a tall shape that might have been a stela rising from it at a listing angle. He'd been right. He was going to die right.

His camel jounced and swayed along, untroubled by its increasingly limp and unbalanced rider. Maybe more water and less camel, somehow, would have been a better use for his money — but no, he would never have made it this far in the first place. The Temple of the Sun Abiding was an insoluble problem for a lone man spending the last of his coin at the edge of civilization, where even stone and scrub boiled away into infinite, trackless dunes. Easier to cross the ravenous sea.

Jayavir's skin felt withered and tight, and his body and throat and head ached comprehensively. He'd come to miss sweating. There were ways a person with access to a camel could save his own life, when the prospect of death in the desert breathed a little too tangibly on the back of his neck. The problem with each of these lifesaving measures was that they all involved besting a camel in a physical contest, and therefore had the additional, hidden stipulation that this hypothetical person must not pass out from sunstroke, as Jayavir was just doing now.

Cold air slammed down on him with such weight it should have clanged like a portcullis. Jayavir came awake gasping and kicking. He nearly slipped from the arms of the person carrying him, who made a hasty grab for him just before he fell.

They were descending a stair, in a cool place that smelled of wet and greenness. The desert might as well have been a dream. Had it been a dream? Or was this the dream, Jayavir's mind pulling a vision of comfort and sweetness about itself like a blanket as it failed? Or ... or had the desert been a dream after all, and was he in fact just a boy with a fever, being carried down the monastery's long stairs to its infirmary....

No. His eyes burned, too dry to open. The pain of a cracked lip sang for an instant above the chorus of the rest of his aches. The desert had been very real. Whoever had hold of Jayavir hitched him into a more agreeable position and continued their descent. It felt like a man, a surefooted and compactly muscular one; it sounded like one too, when Jayavir tried to force words through his parched throat, and his rescuer shushed him in a language he didn't recognize.

The stairs went down and down. They curved, Jayavir thought. Sounds were strange here, hushed and echoing: it was enclosed, but huge. A frog sang somewhere. Was this the temple? Were they descending into it? Could he see it, right now, if he could just get his damned eyes to work? He pressed at them desperately with the heel of his palm, trying to get them watering enough for his eyelids to move without agony. In the desert, the air had scratched and pried at him, and finally wrung him dry like a rag; here, it touched his face as softly and generously as the hand of a lover, but he could imbibe only so much moisture from it alone. If this man who'd found him, whoever he was, would just stop a moment and give Jayavir something to drink—

A splash. Jayavir's rescuer had stepped into water. Jayavir could not have imagined a sound more enticing; thirst constricted his throat. For a moment he thought, hoped, the stranger might simply drop him in, but he laid Jayavir down in the shallows instead, as gently as into a sacred font.

By the time he'd extricated his arm from beneath Jayavir, Jayavir had ducked his face into the water and was drinking. He would have drunk turbid river water, larvae and all, if that was what was on offer, but this was cold and mineral-flavored and bracingly clean. The sun's killing heat poured from him as the water poured in. Paradise.

Before he had taken more than a couple of gulps, the stranger seized him by the jaw and pulled his face out of the water. Jayavir's throat was recovered enough to issue a protest, but he thought better of it when the stranger put a waterskin in his hands. Its contents had the same mineral taste as the water he was submerged in, but other tastes as well. Honey, he thought, and salt. One way or another, this stranger knew the same desert survival lessons imparted to Jayavir perfunctorily by the woman who sold him his camel and his water — and had access to a beehive, to judge by the chunk of squashed honeycomb Jayavir felt in the waterskin as its shape collapsed.

Jayavir drank too fast to breathe. When the waterskin was empty he slumped, panting, against the rough rock wall at his back. The stranger took the skin from him without comment. Jayavir's scarf was sodden; he unwound it from his head and neck and used it to scrub the sweat and sand from his face, and then to soak his eyes until they could be coaxed open.

They weren't in the temple. They were in a cave, and the temple was in here with them.

It rose like a monolith from a platform in the center of the improbably blue lake. The cave's one huge aperture yawned in the ceiling directly above it, admitting shafts of golden light and long skeins of root and vine that hung about the building like veils. Trees had sprung up everywhere that was flat enough for a little sand to settle, and creeping plants fuzzed the blocky shapes of the architecture — but beneath the overgrowth, Jayavir saw sharp corners, and carvings that still stood out crisply against the white stone. It looked like it had been built and abandoned a few decades ago, not twelve hundred years.

The stranger bumped Jayavir's elbow and, when Jayavir looked over at him with a gasp, put the newly refilled waterskin in Jayavir's hand.

Well, this was a pickle. Not that Jayavir wasn't grateful to this man for saving his life and bringing him right to the temple, but he hadn't planned for there to be anyone else around when he robbed it.

"Thank you," Jayavir said, after his third skinful of water.

The stranger only smiled and dunked the skin back in the lake to refill it. He was a man of anywhere between twenty and forty years, with glossy dark skin and dreadlocked hair scorched gold at the ends by the sun. He still knelt in the shallows at Jayavir's side; his one garment, a pair of threadbare knee-length breeches, clung wetly to his thighs. Pilgrim? Fellow burglar? Native? Had he come upon Jayavir on the trip here, or already been at the oasis?

Better to start small. "What's your name?" said Jayavir.

The stranger gave him the same tolerant smile again, and offered Jayavir the waterskin and a chunk of honeycomb.

"No — that is, thank you, of course, but—" Oh, of course. He tried again, this time in highlands Phrinni: "Thank you." If the stranger even recognized it as a different language, his expression did not show it. "No? Thank you?"

Kessite and Keleni had no more effect. Jayavir tried a few more, fully half the languages spoken along the Continental Highway, including trader hand sign and two in which thank you was about the extent of his vocabulary. The only one that provoked a reaction was the longest shot, the ghost of old liturgical Xhyget from his childhood. It must have been merely its throat-rattling sounds that made the stranger tilt his head: when Jayavir added, "Do you understand me? What's your name?" in the same tongue, the stranger had nothing to say.

As if this hadn't already been a predicament. He thought the stranger might test his own languages out on Jayavir, but he seemed content to let Jayavir make a fool of himself without comment. "Well, thank you all the same," Jayavir said, reverting to his native Danahali, and hauled himself shakily to his feet.

The wall of the cave supported him on one side; when he staggered anyway, the stranger rose gracefully and took the elbow on the other side. Water streamed down his calves from his breeches, which looked like a single length of rough linen folded and tucked about his body. In that getup, he could have been a field laborer or a craftsman or a beggar in any of six countries on this side of the Highway. He had no jewelry on, no tattoos, no ritual scars, which ruled out two of the six. No scars at all, Jayavir saw on a second look, which ruled out laborer and craftsman and beggar after all. Could a man live out here in the desert without ever skinning a knee or suffering a bad insect bite? Surely not. Perhaps a pilgrim, then, wealthy enough to have lived a soft life and mad enough to risk it all on a campfire story for bored relic-hunters....

Jayavir's mind spun and spun and halted only when the stranger squeezed his arm, and he realized he was staring.

His face heated. "Excuse me. You can imagine it's been quite a day."

His tone must have translated, even if the words didn't. The stranger tucked his smile into the corner of his mouth, and a dimple appeared in his smooth cheek. He had a face for statuary, with just the sort of long planes and deep curves that one would want to run a hand over. And Jayavir — had not actually stopped staring at him, though the Temple of the Sun Abiding stood in its impossible glory just beyond his shoulder.

"I might ... need to lie down," Jayavir said, and sagged between his rescuer and the rough wall.

Some things transcended language. The stranger guided him up the stairs.

Jayavir's indifferent camel lay ruminating in the shade of a palm tree. The stranger deposited Jayavir beneath a different one, and he and the camel eyed each other silently while the stranger bustled off. The sun rested huge and rippling on the horizon, draping long slanted shadows across the oasis. The greedy air immediately rifled Jayavir's many layers of desert linen for the lakewater that had soaked into it down below, and for a brief, glorious while, evaporation cooled him so deeply that he shivered.

Now that sunstroke was no longer the most immediate concern, his body opened the ledger of other insults he'd recently dealt it and began to recite. He'd spent days trying to outpace his own death by thirst, riding whenever the camel condescended to be ridden and sleeping only in terrified snatches. If there was a comfortable way to sit on a camel, he was not convinced humankind had discovered it.

The good news was that if he got back to civilization alive, he would never have anything to prove to anyone, ever again. With a little bit of extra luck, he might also be unthinkably rich. What was being more sore and tired than he'd ever felt in his life, compared to that?

His host offered him dates and palm-hearts, fresh food, and he ate with delirious relief and joy. Halfway into the meal, he wobbled over to his camel, who watched him cynically while he went through her saddlebags for the dried meat he'd bought for the journey. It wouldn't have been enough, he now saw, any more than his water had been, but he had been abstaining for days because of its saltiness.

When he revealed what was in the package, the stranger reacted with the same shock and delight Jayavir had himself felt a few minutes ago. He squeezed Jayavir's hands, clasped his shoulders, and bit into a strip of jerky with reverentially closed eyes. He had been in the middle of clearing leaf litter and sand out of a cracked trough hollowed from a palm trunk, but with the introduction of meat into the meal he came and sat and ate with Jayavir, listening attentively but without apparent comprehension to his drowsy smalltalk.

The sky dimmed and the sun sank slowly behind the stranger, gilding his bare shoulders. Jayavir was still looking at him, staring and staring, unable to stop. It seemed as likely as any other explanation for his presence here that he had been caressed to life from stone by some supernal chisel just a few minutes before Jayavir's arrival, but barring that, he was probably accustomed to people taking a second look.

Jayavir should revisit the idea that he was just hallucinating in a drift of sand somewhere. Led to the archaeological find of the century by an improbably beautiful man was a better class of idiotic fantasy than his usual, but his mind could be pulling out all the stops for the singular occasion of his death. He supposed he could be absolutely sure this was too good to be true if this fellow next unveiled a heap of money, or perhaps a smiling council of monastery elders eager to praise Jayavir's career choices.

Sleep crept up as soon as his stomach was full, and he carried that thought down with him into dreams.

It was heat that woke him. Maybe nothing else would have; he had slept from sunset almost to noon. The stranger must have dug the tent out of Jayavir's saddlebags overnight, because it had been erected over him in situ like a Four Sisters shrine around a sacred meteor. The saddle itself lay not far away.

The trough from last night was full of water now, and the reed basket seeping into the sand near the flap of Jayavir's tent suggested how this had been accomplished. When he emerged and creaked his way to his feet, the stranger greeted him with apricots and brown eggs. Chicken eggs, Jayavir thought — though if so, he couldn't hear their clucking in the background bustle of the oasis. There must have been cultivation here once, to support the builders and then the clergy. As for the stranger, there was nothing to indicate where he had slept last night or, for that matter, if he had done so at all. From the fullness of the trough, he might have spent all night hauling up water for an ungrateful camel. Jayavir made a point of thanking him for the both of them.

All right. Jayavir was clearly, definitively not going to die in the immediate future. That meant he had other problems to solve. After he'd finished eating, he stretched and paced until some of the soreness was out of his limbs, and then he went down into the cave to confront the temple.

The stranger followed, and sat on the stairs chewing on a strip of jerky while Jayavir walked a circuit of the platform where the temple stood. The stairs were cut into the rock: they followed the wall halfway up and then plunged into it, letting out on the surface at an overgrown cairn. Around them, the unworked stone was half-shrouded with clinging greenery and scored with the horizontal bands of geologic time. Sand and water had blunted the edges of the stonework. Human feet had worn their passage into it.

Yet the temple stood untouched by all these things. It was improbably tall and narrow and seemed to have been designed with no rhyme or reason, just long white rectangles of stone jammed next to and atop each other as though scrambling to be the first to burst up through the cave mouth. Its windows were little slits or circles which occurred only where they suited the carvings that covered every wall, and what the huge arcs and circles of these carvings meant, Jayavir could not say. Who was building like this, a millennium ago? Who had ever built like this, buildings so impervious to time?

He had sort of thought the stranger had tagged along to show him around the temple. By the time he'd walked three quarters of the way around it, he could see what was wrong with that idea.

There was no door.

Water lapped along the path from the temple to the base of the stairs: it was half walkway, half stepping-stones. Jayavir stalked back up it.

"You mean you haven't even been inside?"

The stranger must have understood something, from tone, from context. No one looked that innocent unless they knew exactly what was going on.

"Who are you? What in every name of the Sun are you doing here? I'm not sure you even own more than a length of cloth and whatever old things you've found around the oasis!"

He hadn't been expecting a reply, yet the stranger's silence and steady dark gaze still defeated him. Jayavir sat down hard on the step next to him, then flinched at his own aches. He sighed.

"Why even come here, unless you're as much of a fool as I am?"

The stranger stroked Jayavir's arm in a manner that was probably meant to be soothing. It was not soothing. He must have felt Jayavir shiver. Well, at least he wouldn't say anything about it. Jayavir put a hand over the stranger's just to still it, which probably was not, overall, any less incriminating.

"All right," he said, "all right, I hear you. You hatched perfectly formed from a roc egg and have been waiting here for companionship to arrive. It's the only thing that makes sense."

Maybe it wasn't a temple. The patchwork of myths, maps, ancient caravan manifests and educated guesses that had brought Jayavir here had suggested a place of worship built in immense haste about twelve hundred years ago, just before the convulsion of religious war and mass conversions that had wracked this continent and at least two others at the end of the Orthodoxy Era. But that was a romantic notion: the last temple, the very last one built to the Many-Named Sun when He was worshiped undiminished in every corner of the world.

Maybe he had wanted it, more than a little bit, to be a temple.

No, this was fine. It was probably a tomb. That would explain the lack of ingress, and perhaps why it was underground. Even better for Jayavir, from a strictly monetary perspective. At one time stealing from the dead had bothered him, but it was ultimately just like stealing from the gods, and for the same reasons: they were gone.

He went up into the hot dry day and came back down with his sword and a length of rope. The stranger was where Jayavir had left him, lounging on the last few steps and watching all this like a man at a polo match. The sun was still directly overhead, streaming down onto the flat skyward faces of the temple — the tomb, whatever it was. The lake tossed light gently back up toward the ceiling, to play among its many snaggly little stalactites. Jayavir could see his camel cropping grass at the edge of the cave mouth.

A swim would have been nice. It occurred to him as he was divesting himself of his outer layers, the voluminous, gauzy scarf and cloak and robe that had kept the sun and heat off him in the desert. Despite his brief dunking yesterday, there were probably grains of sand in his hair right now that had been there since he'd set out on this journey, and the lake was deep and blue and inviting. But the stranger was watching him, lounging on his elbows and spectating as though he were waiting for Jayavir to do something interesting, and ... right, maybe later.

On impulse, he tossed his cloak over the stranger's head, earning himself a melodious belly laugh that he hadn't quite expected. The stranger seemed as surprised by it as Jayavir was, and, when he pulled the cloak off himself, a little affronted.

By the cloak, or by his own amusement? Last night and this morning, he'd never given the impression that he thought carrying a half-dead man up and down the stairs or hauling water for a camel were beneath his dignity, but some fleeting haughtiness in his face now raised the question of whether the stranger considered it beneath his station to be entertained by a little horseplay, or above Jayavir's to initiate it.

Jayavir was down to just his vest and trousers now; he balled up his kaftan and dropped it at his feet with his sword and other gear. When he looked up again, the stranger had half-risen to his feet, with Jayavir's discarded cloak hanging seemingly forgotten from his hand. His expression had sharpened, narrowing like a beam of light passed through a lens.

"What?" said Jayavir, as though a verbal answer might be forthcoming.

The answer emerged on its own as the stranger came toward him. He let Jayavir's cloak float to the stone at his feet, and — prowled would not have been the wrong word; he was a graceful man with a deliberate step. Jayavir unthinkingly drew himself taller as the stranger approached, raising his chin, which proved to be exactly what the stranger had wanted. When he was close enough, he reached out to take hold of the pendant that hung just from Jayavir's neck. It was a little cut-glass prism, strung on a leather thong.

"Oh, this," Jayavir said foolishly. "Yes, well — it doesn't exactly have resale value, I suppose I never got out of the habit...."

The stranger looked up into Jayavir's face, searching his expression with an intensity that felt like it should scorch. The prism rested in his palm, and the backs of his knuckles rested, in turn, in the hollow of Jayavir's throat; Jayavir had never been so aware of his own pulse, of the mechanisms of his own voice.

"They must know the Many-Named Sun wherever it is you're from," he found himself saying, breathlessly, "and wear the prism. No, of course they do, why else would you be here. If you could tell me what they call Him there, I could tell you where you're from, or at least where your ancestors left."

The stranger did not withdraw. He took another half-step forward; if he were to take another, their knees would brush, or their chests. His face moved minutely — his jaw, then his eyes, then the muscle that tensed his mouth.

"I grew up in a temple of the Sun Elusive," Jayavir went on. He had a sense of talking this man down, but he knew not from what, or whether it was for his own safety or the stranger's. "The Gone-and-There-and-Gone Sun. We have actual rain where I come from — in the right season, six hours of torrential downpour, then the sun rakes across the city for five minutes as a gap in the clouds passes over, and then it rains for the rest of the day. You never know whether to expect it. Those are our most sacred days." He paused. "Or were. I don't think the temple's there anymore."

He had no idea if this was working or, if so, what he would consider a success. But — the stranger had stroked his arm earlier, when Jayavir had been agitated, and last night he had squeezed Jayavir's shoulders in delight. He might not have understood a word out of Jayavir's mouth yet, but he would understand that, surely. At this proximity his wrist and shoulder and elbow were all in easy reach, bare and gleaming.

Jayavir reached up and put his hand on the stranger's cheek.

This was probably what success looked like: the stranger releasing Jayavir's prism like it had burned his hand and backing away. The tension was broken. That had been the goal.

The stranger seemed as out of sorts as Jayavir felt. He backed off until his bare foot touched Jayavir's fallen cloak, then stooped to pick it up and began folding it. A fine excuse to break eye contact. Two could play at this game: Jayavir picked up the scarf he'd dropped earlier and wound it distractedly around his waist, tucking it into itself.

One of them didn't talk. How could they be locked in an uncomfortable silence if all there had really been between them were silences?

"All right," he said. Maybe he was just getting too accustomed to the sound of his own meaningless patter. "Try this one. Your throne was usurped. You were stranded on the wrong side of the continent by a scheming vizier or cousin. I'm the first commoner you've ever met, and as soon as we figure out how to communicate, you're going to offer me my weight in pearls and emeralds to help you regain your throne." He hooked the toe of his shoe under his sword and flipped it up into his hand, then thrust the scabbard diagonally through his sash at the small of his back.

The stranger gave him a wary sidelong look. Despite himself, Jayavir grinned.

"It's the only thing that makes sense," he said, slung his coil of rope around his shoulder, and trotted back down the walkway to the temple.

In terms of sheer surfaces Jayavir had scaled, this one quickly emerged as a favorite.

The vines and roots that snaked along the temple walls were so old. Just wonderful. As many sturdy hand- and footholds as he could possibly have desired. He'd spent most of his career breaking into the reliquaries of temples with an active clergy clearing the vines and fixing the broken window-latches. Second-story work had made Jayavir's name among the sort of people who knew the names of thieves, but he often had to resort to exploiting sacred timetables, impersonating pilgrims and, admittedly, on one occasion, crawling through a sewer. Maybe, if he survived this trip, it was time to consider branching out into antiquities.

The hand-sized windows that punctuated the walls did not look in on rooms; they were narrow tunnels into solid rock, apparently without bottom. Perhaps lightshafts, though how a sunbeam was expected to hit them at the right angle, Jayavir didn't know. He refrained from putting his extremities too deep into their cobwebby depths.

Two or three times his own height off the ground, he reached a grassy ledge, the top of a rectangular shape that protruded arbitrarily from the wall; he sat, stretched, rested a while, then resumed his climb. The next ledge up was shaded by a bent little tree that leaned far out over the side of the building. The next rebuffed him with thornbushes.

It wasn't a quick ascent, but the sun was still high when he hauled himself up onto what he judged to be roughly the top of the tower — a high plateau blanketed with undergrowth, bristling with fig and palm trees. Narrower towers of white rock rose from and around this platform.

A door would have been nice. Instead, there was a statue.

Jayavir had to hack away centuries of overgrowth with his sword to decipher it. It was bronze, curiously unblackened by age, and he thought it might be in the shape of a scale taller than a man. Not a symbol usually associated with the Many-Named Sun, in this period or any other: He was a god neither of commerce nor of justice. Maybe in His capacity as a revelator....

As the statue emerged into the dappled light under the palms, Jayavir saw that the weight on one side was a sphere the size of his doubled fists. The weight on the other was a sphere the size of his entire person. It was so heavy it rested on the floor; designs like flames licked across its surface. A second look at the smaller sphere showed the continents etched on its surface — all five, though only four should have been known at this end of the Continental Highway a millennium ago.

A tiny, anachronistic globe and a huge, fiery one. A bit like the astronomer Pallavi's proposition that the sun — not the Sun, but the straightforwardly physical object in the sky — was very large and very far away. Jayavir dug the grass and roots and sand away from the base of the larger sphere with his hands and his poor abused sword, until he saw just the thing he'd hoped to see: it was sitting on a rectangular bronze plate with a handle on one side.

A hatch. This was a lock.

A search of the rooftop revealed no mechanism for raising the large sphere other than lowering the small one. Maybe there had been one and it had rotted away at some point, but he doubted it. Time seemed not to trouble this building.

Jayavir hauled on the smaller globe, then hung from it two-handed, feet in the air. His full weight was insufficient to budge the scales. He dropped back to the grass. His rope wouldn't fit through the links of the chain that suspended the globe, but if he could knot a harness for it, and then loop the other end around a nearby tree, and pull....

The tree simply tore up, exposing the white stone beneath its roots. There was so little actual sand under all this green; he'd forgotten. He set the tree back to rights with an apology, and patted the scrub at its base back into place.

There were no convenient protuberances to loop a rope around on the temple architecture. Jayavir mentally amended the list of equipment he'd bring next time he tried to get himself killed in the desert. For now, he let the rope catch at the base of the large sphere and used that for leverage. He hauled at it with both hands, skidding in the grass until his feet met the sphere, then put the soles of his shoes up onto the metal and tried again, straining until his shoulders popped. There may have been the slightest, most incremental movement of the scale, and perhaps the very faintest squeak of metal grinding against itself, but that was all he could manage alone. He let the tension in his body go and dropped onto the platform with a groan.

He needed a second pair of hands. He would have to get the stranger up here.

Well, he was ... he was a fit man, from the looks of him. He should be able to manage the climb. Jayavir would just have to—

He experienced a vivid premonition of all the ways in which he would have to hold and grip the stranger to get him up a four-storey tower. He lay in the grass for a while, marinating in that terror, then took a deep breath and rappelled back down to the base of the temple.

The stranger was still lounging on the bottom stair, but he must have gone up top at some point for some dates and what looked like part of a broken amphora, which he was using as a cup for water. The lake's reflected light serpentined across his strong face, his smooth arms.

"I need your help," Jayavir said, as though this were a normal acquaintanceship involving a common language and no desecration of holy places.

The stranger offered him some fruit. No question whether he was being obtuse on purpose — but, oh, fine. Jayavir sat and ate with him, and used the time to consider his angle of attack.

When the dates were gone, he took the stranger by the hand and simply pulled him to his feet, then back across the water to the tower. He followed along agreeably enough, though each time Jayavir glanced back, he was greeted with a slightly different expression of skepticism.

Jayavir's rope was just long enough to pool a little on the stones at the base of the temple. He yanked on it evocatively, then gestured up toward the platform with the statue-lock. "I need your help," he said again, just for punctuation. "Up there."

Consternation wrinkled the stranger's expression; he took a step back. Jayavir caught him by the arm and leaned into him when he turned his face up in surprise.

"I know how it looks," Jayavir said, "but I just climbed it an hour ago. I know exactly how difficult it is or isn't. I can get you to the top, I promise. All I need is for you to trust me."

There was no reason for the stranger to extend his trust and no way for him to understand that that was the thing Jayavir was asking for, except that maybe words like I promise and trust me were spoken a little alike in every language. Jayavir could see the stranger evaluating the proposition, considering the rope, considering Jayavir. At last, he nodded.

Jayavir laughed delightedly and took the stranger's face in his hands. It would have been easy to kiss him. He touched their foreheads together instead, conspiratorially, and the stranger's body swayed toward his so easily that Jayavir almost changed his mind on the spot and went for the kiss after all. But no, no; he had no idea what signals meant what to this man, and they had to work together — and, of course, there was no way to guess how the stranger would respond to learning why Jayavir had come here in the first place. Maybe, if they learned to speak to each other. Maybe then.

He dashed back to the stairs for his cloak and twisted it into a rope, then a harness, as he returned. The stranger watched him with folded arms and an air of bemusement, as though Jayavir were very much not what he expected of a dying desert wanderer. Well, good.

This climb really moved the sun across the sky. It was twice the work and took three times as long; Jayavir stopped their progress often so they could sprawl together on this ledge or that until they were ready for the next leg. He tried to maintain some decorum at first, but before long, he had grabbed the stranger by the thighs so many times they were considered married in at least one religion. He obviously had no experience scaling walls, but he was strong and a quick study, and it seemed like he might have watched Jayavir's first ascent closely enough to remember a few of the handholds he'd used.

Only the organic ones, though — vines, roots. It didn't come to Jayavir's attention that the stranger never used the windows for handholds until they were halfway up and the stranger stopped, stymied by an expanse of stone that the plants had grown around instead of across. Jayavir made a series of increasingly vulgar gestures on the theme of put your hand in the hole, none of which yielded the desired effect. Eventually, the stranger made an exasperated noise and began searching for a handhold off to his left.

This was beyond the reach of pantomime. Jayavir was below him — his foot, in fact, was on Jayavir's shoulder. Jayavir tapped it until he removed it, then hauled himself up a body-length, interposing himself between the stranger and his intended detour.

The surprise on the stranger's face when Jayavir took his hand and put it into the window was as comical as it was baffling. He seemed perfectly intelligent; how could he not have seen...?

Jayavir had been watching him closely anyway, tracking where he placed his hands and feet, taking the slack out of the rope as they progressed up the tower. Now he remembered as well as watched: vine, vine, root root root, vine ... never a window, as though it weren't really the wall the stranger were climbing, but only the greenery on it.

"I'd give almost anything for you to be able to tell me whatever it is you know about this place," Jayavir muttered. The stranger glanced down at the sound of his voice, then reached for the next root.

At the top of the tower, they fell in a panting, laughing pile together. They were so close to the goal, the lock, the hoped-for trove that Jayavir had crossed a desert and nearly died for, but — it could wait another moment, for them to catch their breath, for relief to chase the strain of the climb from their bodies.

These might be the last moments before their agendas diverged.

Jayavir still had no notion of what this man was doing at the oasis in the first place. He could easily have just come for water, or because he was lost — and Jayavir did still sort of like his dethroned king theory. But it seemed far more likely that he belonged to some cult of the Sun, perhaps the last member of an expedition that had failed in the same way Jayavir's almost had. He might worship the Sun Militant or the Sun Pursuing, and then Jayavir would be in real trouble once he clarified his intentions for whatever was inside this building.

Or he might not care about the Many-Named Sun at all. He might simply not be impressed with a thief. There were a hundred reasons he might not look at Jayavir like this again, lit up with laughter and a sunbeam that had snuck its way through the palm fronds to find him.

It would be a shame to waste this time on caution, then.

The stranger got an elbow and a knee under himself, preparing to rise, then stopped. His gaze caught on Jayavir's face. Perhaps Jayavir had been looking too openly. Perhaps he was just bothered by the lock of hair that had fallen into Jayavir's eyes; he reached up to brush it aside.

"I've figured it out," Jayavir said softly. "You're a spirit. A god sent you — one of the South Keleni ones that they mosaic with mirror shards in the temple frescoes, so they glitter like the night sky when the candles are lit. I always thought those were so beautiful." He reached up slowly to touch the swell of the stranger's bottom lip, and the stranger evinced no surprise, made no move to prevent him. "You're here to open my heart and convince me I want to be a holy man again."

He trailed his fingertip down the stranger's chin and down his long throat, and placed his palm, finally, where the stranger's collarbones met. His own pulse made itself known to him again; he felt the tiny weight of the prism that rested in the same spot on his own chest with uncharacteristic keenness.

Jayavir took his time leaning up off the grass to kiss the stranger, and the stranger watched him the whole way with avid patience. He was breathlessly still when their mouths met, and Jayavir experienced one moment of terror that he might be kissing a man who didn't know what kissing was, until the stranger pressed him down flat atop the final temple of the Many-Named Sun and kissed Jayavir with all the extravagance of his voluptuous mouth, all the quiet force of the person Jayavir took him to be.

"Yeah," Jayavir said at last, breathlessly, half into the stranger's mouth. "I think that makes sense."

They got to their feet eventually. Jayavir, laughing again, disentangled the stranger from his ad-hoc cloak-harness and left it at the edge of the platform; in turn, he brushed leaves from Jayavir's hair.

Now that they were no longer distracting each other, Jayavir had imagined the stranger would focus on the most striking thing up here apart from ... well, himself: the scales, and the models of the world and the sun.

Instead, he looked at the tree Jayavir had uprooted. He looked over the edge at the view down into the water, then up through the mouth of the cave. His gaze seemed not even to snag momentarily on the statue, as though it weren't there at all.

Preposterous. Except....

He had seemed not to notice the window he could have used as a handhold. Or any window, even right in front of his face. He had seemed not to be able to see them at all. As though he couldn't see any part of the temple, only the plants that overgrew it.

Absolute nonsense. That would explain why the stranger had evinced no real interest in the tower, and had made no obvious effort to get inside prior to Jayavir's arrival, but it would also require something like a ... a curse, and curses were not real. Jayavir had spent his entire adult life and much of his youth stealing sacred things and peddling them on the black market. He'd stolen from dozens of gods, and most of them did not forgive and forget like the Sun Elusive. If anyone at all, anywhere, were cursed, it would be Jayavir, and he would have noticed by now.

Gods did not work in this world, that was all. They did not save temples, nor worshipers; they did not exact vengeance. They would allow a thief into their holiest places without repercussion, so there was no reason a thief shouldn't go into those places and take what he could.

That left Jayavir without an explanation for ... whatever this was. He stood and watched until the stranger looked up from peering down into the water, cast an impatient glance around the platform as though there were nothing of obvious interest on it, then fixed imperiously on Jayavir, who knew a get on with it when he saw one. The stranger's gaze still never rested on the scales.

Jayavir picked up the rope from where it lay. He'd never untied it from the globe of the world, on the off chance that the weight of two men climbing would undo the lock for them on the way back up. No such luck, but it had served well enough as a stable place to tie onto.

"What do you think it means?" he said, gesturing at the sculpture. He looped the rope around the foot of the sun-globe again and held the slack out to the stranger, trying to quiet the who are you, who are you that rang in his thoughts. "Make the world heavier than the sun to open the hatch. Make the world greater than the sun to — oh, I don't know, reveal what the sun is keeping from us? This place feels awfully blasphemous. Or it could just be an obvious way to decorate two bronze weights on top of a temple to the Sun."

Of course there was no answer. The stranger would not suddenly betray a secret comprehension of what Jayavir was saying just because Jayavir had taken a bizarre notion into his head. Whatever was going on here, he was just a man, an odd man met in an odd place.

He took the rope from Jayavir and allowed himself to be pushed and pulled into position: behind Jayavir, with his feet planted in the grass. It had not quite sunk in for Jayavir that the stranger had no way at all to infer the nature of the assistance he had been brought up here to render — until Jayavir put his hands on the rope, he clearly had no idea that he was about to play tug-of-war with a statue.

Jayavir also wasn't entirely sure this man had ever played tug-of-war. He tried to move his hands to Jayavir's waist at first, and had to be corrected. Jayavir resorted to pantomime again to give him a notion of the heaving that would soon transpire. The stranger swayed behind him like a dance partner.

Wherever the stranger was from, they evidently didn't count one-two-three before they did things there. They had a false start, then a somewhat more successful one in which Jayavir immediately lost his footing and fell more or less into the stranger's lap. The stranger set him arights; in the fumbling and confusion, his dreadlocked hair pattered against the shoulder of Jayavir's vest with a sound a little like rain. Jayavir found himself thinking of the gentle Sun of his childhood, reaching through the clouds for a moment to make the city steam, then gone. The memory of kissing him was so near and vivid it was physical, a thing that lived in Jayavir's lips and jaw as much as in his mind.

Later. Later. Jayavir took hold of the rope again.

They got it on the third attempt. Jayavir felt it working at once: the mechanisms of their bodies aligning just so, both of them seeking new purchase with their feet at the same moment.

The next thing he felt, with terrifying intimacy, was that the stranger was phenomenally strong. He could have done this at any time. Some wild part of Jayavir envisioned him simply lifting the sun-globe with his bare hands. But even if he could do that, he would have needed someone like Jayavir to show him where it was, and how to reach it, and what to do.

The sun-globe rose a finger's breadth, two. The loop of rope Jayavir had thrown around its base slipped through and the slack sent both of them tumbling off their feet. The sharp yank their momentum delivered to the world-globe made the whole scale rotate fractionally; the sun-globe swung a few degrees, just far enough to clear the hatch, and settled into the grass with its chain hanging slack.

Jayavir rolled, panting, onto his elbows. The stranger still sprawled where he had fallen. A thousand questions, and Jayavir could ask none of them. He half-expected the stranger to lunge for the hatch, but of course not: he couldn't see it.

Answers would only be forthcoming if Jayavir did it himself.

He felt the stranger's half-closed eyes follow him as he scrambled to his feet, hooked his fingers through the handle in the metal plate, and pulled.

Light speared from the hatch — and, as though he had opened a hundred other doors at once, from each one of the little apertures that marked the tower walls. It felt forceful in a way that light should not, as though it had burgeoned out into the cave like water bursting a dam, as though he should feel it like a fist when it struck his skin.

Jayavir reeled back from the hatch, and might have landed on his ass again if the tower had not first ripped itself apart.

He heard roots tear and felt the scrub underfoot shift, then give way. The great inexplicable white masses of the temple's architecture flew in opposite directions from each other, and the many little toeholds that plants had found on all its flat surfaces ceased to be; the sod that covered the statue platform disintegrated. Jayavir fell among flares of light and tumbling leaves and sand. The trunk of a palm tree struck a painful blow to one of his flailing hands.

Jayavir fell for a long time. He fell long enough to think about how long he had been falling, about what that would mean for the landing, and to discard the hope he would land in the water.

He didn't. He landed on the night sky, instead.

It wasn't a soft landing. He had lost none of his momentum; he felt every bone-crushing instant of his acceleration as it ended, and felt it do nothing worse than knock the wind out of him. He'd taken worse falls down the stairs.

He lay panting and confused on the starry surface where he had fallen, unable to quite catch up with the last minute of his life, until the stranger walked past him. Light rippled from his bare feet, and from the hand that Jayavir put out to lever himself upright with.

They were in a black, glittering place with no borders, just more stars everywhere Jayavir looked, stars and great distant washes of color that held more and more and more stars the more deeply he looked at them. Even without anywhere to call the edge or end of this place, he could tell they must be near the center, because the sun was here.

It was smaller than the globe that had been ... for a moment Jayavir wanted to think of it as upstairs, and almost laughed. He didn't know where they were, but it wasn't down.

The sun was smaller than the bronze globe that had kept this place sealed, but it was furiously brilliant, and it roiled. Jayavir had never understood, looking at it through his eyelashes or a smoked lens, or casting the image of an eclipse on the courtyard floor for the younger initiates: the sun was not a placid white-gold disk, nor even a ball of flame, but a cauldron that never ceased churning. Its convoluted surface writhed; the air snapped and rippled with its presence. Something cracked like a whip in its corona and a dissipating plume of light flung itself free. There was a smell: sweet, metallic, charred.

The stranger was walking straight toward it.

Jayavir lunged unsteadily forward, then caught himself. Some practical human impulse had told him to catch the stranger and hold him back like a friend who might be about to walk into a campfire, but he thought he might have learned just a little better than that in the last couple of hours.

The stranger and the sun reached for each other like reunited lovers. Bands of radiance sprang into being between them, tense with an energy that seemed almost alive, like the curve of a cat's tail or a serpent's body. The burning substance of the sun streamed eagerly along his arms, but he reached further, until he held the sun itself in his hands, and further, and further, until he had brought it close enough to his mouth that he could bite into it like a fruit. Light bloomed and dripped between his teeth; the hot gusting air tossed his hair. The disrupted sphere of the sun billowed and curled and sent more streamers into him, along his shoulders, into his eyes, as though it could not wait to be consumed.

Jayavir watched them, the sun and the Sun, until they grew too brilliant for him and he had to avert his eyes.

Through the afterimages, Jayavir saw that there was one other thing here after all, not far from the center: a dead man, lying in a little heap among the stars.

He trusted neither his legs nor whatever membrane in space it was that he presently rested on, and was not sure, in any case, that he would survive the Sun's attention if he caught it, so he crawled toward the body on his elbows and knees. It was dressed in clothes the provenance of which Jayavir could not have begun to identify, and it looked old. Not decayed or desiccated, just old: the things that usually happened to a corpse must not have been able to happen to it in this place, but he could see how its millennium of repose lay upon it.

It seemed inappropriate to perform death rites over a man while his god stood a mere ten paces away and was clearly not paying any attention whatsoever, but no one had even closed the body's eyes. Jayavir could do that, at least.

A prism hung at the hollow of the dead man's throat. It was hardly more ornate than Jayavir's: cut glass and a twist of metal to hold it on its braided cord. He touched it bemusedly — what a thing, to share a tradition with a man a thousand years gone — and stifled a cry when it touched him back.

Perhaps he felt something of what the Sun was feeling right now, devouring Himself at the center of the universe. What rushed into Jayavir was not raw power of that scale — through the terror, he felt relief, that he wouldn't be simply burnt to a cinder here and now by whatever had lingered in this dead man's holy pendant. It was mostly knowledge. Types of fire he had not guessed existed. The machinery of the cosmos. How to burn the illusions from a doubting mind. Magnetism and gravity, to a degree he had never aspired to understand them. All the places the light of the sun touched, right now. How to take the power allotted directly to a priest by his god, and to subvert and conceal and fold it back on itself until even the Sun All-Seeing could not perceive it.

On the one hand, he didn't want this. On the other hand, he did very much want to know how to get out of here alive, and now he knew.

Jayavir closed the dead man's eyes, and bade him the oldest, most sacred thanks he knew. Then he snapped the cord that held the prism around his neck. It was still in his hand when the Sun approached him. He didn't think that would be a problem.

While Jayavir had been looking away from Him, the Sun's hair had turned white — but His features, His carriage, even His tattered linen breeches were the same. He stood barefoot on infinity, and said, "Thank you."

He spoke a language Jayavir couldn't even have named, in a voice like the velvet of flower petals and the perilous flickering softness of a candle flame against the fingertips. It resonated down into parts of Jayavir's soul that he had not known were waiting to be warmed. He hadn't prayed as anything other than a ruse in over a decade, but now he thought he understood prayer in a way he never had before: he would have shouted himself raw to hear that voice again.

Instead, he laughed. When the Sun looked at him quizzically, he said, "That was the first thing I said to you. Did you really not understand me?"

"Not a word," the Sun said, then paused. "Some of the gestures."

Jayavir laughed again. "Well, you're welcome. I think we're even."

The Sun gave him a look of such tenderness that Jayavir felt a lump rise in his throat. There had been a time in his life when Jayavir would have given anything at all for the ability to go back to believing there was a Sun who watched and cared for him this way, but he had left that boy behind many years and thousands of miles ago. Already he missed, a little, the silent stranger who had offered him fruit just to be difficult.

He staggered upright; the Sun caught his arm and steadied him. He expected to feel heavenly fire licking under the Sun's dark skin, and he did, but it was also just — a warm, pleasantly calloused hand. He had held that hand before. It lingered at Jayavir's elbow, though the Sun's attention fell to the body of the man at their feet.

"More than even," He said distractedly.

Jayavir took a step aside and tucked his hands casually behind his back. The Sun moved into the space he had vacated and knelt at the dead man's side, just as Jayavir had.

"I have a whole litany of questions for you," he said, to the Sun's back.

The Sun nodded absentmindedly. He was considerably less reverential toward the body than Jayavir had been, checking its wrists and throat, then the folds of its clothes; Jayavir half-expected Him to steal the boots off it like a battlefield looter. "You'll have as many answers as you want."

"What started all this?" said Jayavir. He caught himself still hiding his hands like a naughty initiate and let them swing at his sides again.

That stopped the Sun's riffling. He looked up again into Jayavir's face without ever glancing at his hands. The glow of his own hair underlit his jaw. Even here, where he was the strongest source of illumination, the light seemed enthralled by him.

"I died," the Sun said. "I went to war, nearly failed, and was slain. When I returned, the last ember of my power had been locked away by— Jayavir," He said, though Jayavir had never introduced himself to Him by name, "look at this man."

"Who was he?"

"A mistake. Do you see a prism on him?"

"I don't think so," Jayavir said, with the comfortable ring of perfect honesty.

The Sun made a little noise of such clear, human irritation that it eased something tight in Jayavir's chest. He cast about Himself on what passed for the ground here, as though the prism might have skittered away like a dropped coin or earring.

Jayavir touched Him on the shoulder. He looked up sharply, but when Jayavir stroked his free hand down His arm, He offered His own hand up to be held, and allowed Himself to be drawn to His feet and away. Jayavir backed toward what he judged as more or less the center of this place, and was surprised to find that this was not pure guesswork; even without the spare sun to orient toward, he had a sense now of this realm's many directions.

"Don't worry about that," he said, reeling the Sun in by the hand until their bodies brushed.

"I spent eight hundred years at the threshold of my last store of power, so diminished I could hardly see the door to beat my fists on it," the Sun grumbled, but His face turned up toward Jayavir's the way it had every time they were this near each other. Preposterously, He was still shorter than Jayavir.

"It won't happen again," Jayavir said.

There was the skeptical face Jayavir had come to know. Jayavir kissed Him at once. He still tasted a little of the things He had most recently eaten: dates from the oasis, a hidden star. The soft light of his hair flickered through Jayavir's closed eyelids. The Sun made a pleased sound when Jayavir's fingertips traced His naked back, then pulled back a fraction to speak.

"Are you proposing to protect me?" He said, amused and a little haughty.

"Something like that."

The Sun leaned up toward Jayavir again, with His own eyes closed now, and His whole face sweet and relaxed with the anticipation of delight.

Just before their mouths met again, He paused. His face crinkled. "Are you," He said, "in fact, just distracting me?"

"Ah," Jayavir said. "Mm. Not just. I have personal reasons for doing this as well."

"Jayavir. Where is the prism."

"You can't see it, can you," Jayavir said.

"You know the answer to that."

There was just enough real fear in His face to make Jayavir hesitate, and just enough outraged amusement to make him continue. Jayavir traced the Sun's cheek with his fingertips, and the prism swinging from his hand cast rainbows along His skin; He didn't so much as glance down at it.

"It's all yours," Jayavir said, "as soon as you can find it."

He kissed the Sun once more and stepped away, out of the starry darkness, to a place where the sun was shining.