The Uvaniqist temple on Harok is dotted with carved spires of bleached bone and limestone like a breathtakingly large anemone. Pennants and prayer bells flap in the high wind of the halfway terraformed world; the peals of the bells join the wailing wind that shakes the towering glass panels providing cover to the cityscape.

  It’s an archaic way to design an arcology compared to the way the Taiikari do it. Grant can’t believe he’s having that thought—they’re terraforming and you could never even afford a lawn to mow—but one can’t help but notice.

  The shutters of cameras are clicking all around him as he and Tymar approach the temple. Imperial Eqtoran marines, massive and hulking in their HAK suits, form a perimeter before the jostling crowd. Some cheering, some staring, some holding strange carved charms aloft. Someone’s holding their baby up and out like she’s Simba, a crown of bone charms and pressed flowers ringing her head; Grant is not sure what that’s about.

  A flurry of activity and invective jerks Grant’s attention to the edge of the line, where a scowling navy-blue woman shoves against her neighbors and the marine holding them at bay. She barks a jagged line of Eqtorish at Grant, face livid. He hears Tamuraq in it. That old chestnut. Thank God she isn’t close enough for them to consider her a threat. Grant doesn’t want to imagine what those marines would do if she were.

  There’s a corral of sorts, warting out from the uncredentialed crowd, where a pod of camerapeople and reporters in smartly fur-trimmed dress tunics crane for a view past the marines’ armored shoulders. Grant takes a deep breath and adjusts his path.

  A violet-fringed keeper babbles into a scriptomorph and holds it urgently up. Majesty. Why have you come to Harok?

  Grant covers his anxiety with a smile (he’s getting better at that). “Brother Tymar-nai-Indrik and I are here at the invitation of Counselor Minimaq-mek-Harok and Governess Pazeem, to witness today’s service. We’re so grateful to Ecclesiasts Multraq, Qaivor, and Liuaq of the Harok Temple for allowing us entry. That’s the statement. Thank you all.”

  The marines close ranks as he steps away from the press corps, who pepper questions against his retreating back.

  “Now remember,” Tymar says, as he catches up with the contingent of Taiikari holy men and Eqtoran Pike crew. “Choice is God. Choice is sacred. We aren’t arguing the virtue of the choice but that there is a choice to be made. The sacred freedom the Eqtorans talk about. They call it the golden maze. Not a plain, not the wide firmament. Not your or my idea of total freedom. The paths are laid down by the Library Sacrosanct, and they take the paths.”

  Grant’s slick navy boots crunch a dessiccated flower petal in one of the tiny furrows which overlap and fork off in geometric right angles through the path to the temple. “So we have to argue ours isn’t a dead end?”

  Tymar shakes his head. “A dead end is still a path. Getting to a wall and turning back, that’s sacred right. The wrong choice remains a choice. Do you see? Multraq says that your path is false, is clambering out of the maze entirely or knocking one of its walls down. That’s what’s abominable.”

  Grant tries to further insulate himself from the eyes of the crowd by leaning into the conversation. “I don’t know if I’m following.”

  Ruaq glances over her shoulder; she and Ipqen are walking ahead, having a conversation that Grant can’t hear over the commotion of their watching crowd.

  “There’s a translation thing here,” Tymar says. “Choice doesn’t mean quite exactly the same thing. Eqtoran understanding of their own psychology—it’s different from the average Maekyonite’s. From what I understand of your homeland, a common vision of freedom is the choice to go anywhere, do anything.”

  “So how does the Eqtoran idea differ?”

  “How to explain. Mmm.” Tymar points at the bright sun shower that pelts the dome. “The rain up there, on the glass. You see the drops going down; they drift, but they cut, too, into the paths that other drops took. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yyyyes? Maybe.”

  “The ant atop the throok,” Cerik says.

  Tymar nods. “Thank you, love. A much more apt metaphor.”

  Grant’s about to ask what that means but Tymar’s already explaining:

  “It’s a South Kymrian parable. From the Serpent’s Breath sector. They’re not Eqtorans, but they think about consciousness similarly. So there’s an ant atop a throok. A, uh—a kind of bug that builds colonies. Do you have something like that on Maekyon?”

  “Ants? Yeah. My translator one-to-oned it, even.”

  “Oh, good. Imagine an ant that finds itself, by some quirk of time’s passage, upon the back of a slavering, instinctive beast. And central to the ant’s psychological well-being is the thought: this beast is mine to command. Where I wish it, the beast goes. Now this is of course fatuous. The beast is a beast. It goes where it will. It is predictable; it does beast things. It eats, it fornicates, that sort of thing. The ant is the conscious mind. The throok is the unconscious, bearing us where it will.” Tymar spreads his hands. “So, the South Kymrians ask us: what does the ant spend its day doing, exactly?”

  “Nothing?”

  “Ahh.” Tymar lowers all his fingers but one. “Not nothing. The ant justifies. The ant spends a great deal of time deciding the meaning behind each instinctual choice. The ant tells itself a story about why it chose to do what the beast was always going to do. In this way, it constructs, painstakingly, a facade of control over itself and its fate.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “That’s dire.”

  “Well, yes. It’s a sorry state, being an ant on a throok. But here’s the thing. What one ant can only pretend to do, what about many ants? Watching their beasts race about, humping and peeing on everything, telling one another the same pretend stories? They can’t control the beast, no. Not really. What they can do, the ants, is work together to construct. It’s like what they say about religious people, eh, Grantyde?” He winks. “However much bunk we believe, the architecture sure is impressive. And so the ants reorder the world, putting up walls—”

  “Ant-sized walls?”

  “How big are your ants’ structures?” Tymar chuckles. “I’m guessing smaller than the South Kymrian ones.”

  “Uh, yeah. Not big enough for the metaphor.”

  “Okay, well, go with me the rest of the way with a certain amount of suspension for the shakiness. The powerless ants, in their numbers, might from their imagination and collaboration create a maze. A vast and gleaming array of paths that pen the beasts upon which they ride. Steer it, maybe not. But a beast won’t climb a wall or dig a new tunnel when there’s an easily trotted passage before it. That’s the Golden Maze. A great, vast, generational project of the Eqtorans, built and tended for thousands of years by their ecclesiasts and their books of song.”

  Quill’s words echo in Grant’s head. It will go away quickly, and the ones to come after will not miss it.

  “This is the scurrying, atomic strength of civilization. Whether it’s religion, philosophy, ethics—song, especially, to the Eqtorans. The most visible way you’ve seen it shaped is by music, but it suffuses them, as bone-deep as your wife’s loyalty, or your self-determination. Look for mazes on Eqtoran stuff, next time you’re close to it. Look at the street we’re walking on, or the doors we’ll pass through, soon. Look at this robe you’re wearing, even. The scrollwork on the sleeves.” Tymar taps his finger against the interwoven knotwork decorating Grant’s forearms. “See the entrance and the exit?”

  “Oh, wow.” Grant stares at the design—now that he realizes what they are, they’re hypnotic.

  “You’ll see it everywhere now that you know to look,” Tymar says. “Little breaks in the lines or t-junctions. Sykora’s utopia—every Taiikari utopia, really—is one where the choice between two branching paths is made for her by a loving guide. Yours is a world without walls, where nothing prevents you from going wherever you wish. Both are intolerable to the Eqtoran ethos. Freedom is a maze.”

  Grant’s eyes track the paths along his arms. He doubles back, finds a path.

  “They really are gorgeous, aren’t they?”

  He looks up from his sleeves. “The mazes?

  “The Eqtorans. All they’ve made, all they’ve accomplished. All they’re sharing with us now.” The crowd and its cityscape shine in amber across Tymar’s anticomps. “How amazingly lucky are we, to walk these paths with them?”

  The weighty thump of the temple doors swinging shut cuts the Maekyonite and the Taiikari off from the crowd and the sound, the cheers and outcry, and replaces it with an ethereal, five-part harmony of Eqtoran voices raised in song. The hair on Grant’s arms raises like tuning antennae to the sound.

  Grant recognizes beauty in Eqtorans, even if he himself isn’t quite attracted to shark-people. They’re brawny and statuesque, and their golden eyes have an arresting intensity. But the most beautiful thing about them is their voices. The coarsest, most gravelly Eqtoran, when it comes time to sing, holds forth with perfect, unwavering pitch. Beyond the bone-beaded curtains of the Harok Temple threshold is a chorus of hundreds, and the sound of their combined choir is gorgeous and otherworldly.

  He nearly trips over Ruaq as they halt on the temple’s altar floor. The oval-shaped room is thick with Eqtorans, in a panoply of shades from sandy to navy. They sit packed in the surrounding rows of stadium seats, like observers in some arena of antiquity.

  The temple, like all Uvanaqist temples, is divided down the checkerboarded center. Two antique altars stand on either side of the recessed floor, one cast in ebony, the other carved from ivory. The ivory altar is surrounded by shelves of bound and weighty tomes—the Library Sacrosanct—and, at the moment, by a whispering huddle of Eqtorans. Upon the entry of the aliens, they step apart from one another, revealing their ringleader, who has already lifted the golden robe from its place across the altar and swept it over qer thin shoulders.

  Ecclesiast Multraq is small, even for a keeper, and spindly. Qer fringe reaches almost to the floor, tousling the ecclesiast’s golden robe as qe speaks, loud and on the edge of the swelling song like a performer at a musical.

  Grant raises his translation panel as Multraq begins to speak. This thing is going to be essential in the next few minutes.

  “Siblings,” Multraq cries. “Mark where the Taiikari come again. Worming their way into what’s sacred. What’s natural. Twisting it all around. We see you, Brother. You and your omnidivine. Compressing every holy writ into cardboard.”

  Tymar steps into the temple’s center. In Eqtorish that, to Grant’s ear, is as gutturally perfect as Multraq’s, he says, “Good afternoon to you too, Ecclesiast.”

  Ipqen hunkers by Grant and peers at the translation panel over his shoulder. “I know some of these words,” she whispers. He can hear the same excitement in her that he had when he started to relearn English.

  “You bring your alien ways into this place,” Multraq says. “Alien godlessness. I know you, Brother Tymar. I’ve seen you preach. You know the right and fancy words but you don’t have the feeling behind it.”

  “You don’t know my heart.” Tymar sweeps purposefully across the floor, toward the vacant ebony altar. Grant and the mek-Taqas hurry to follow him. Around them the choir turns ominous and minor-key. “I am here because I choose it. You want to tell me I can’t, you’d better have an airtight chapter-call in there.”

  One of Multraq’s minions scoffs, in rhythm with a crescendo from the watchers in their rows. “And if you want to step onto that altar, Brother, you’d better have an ecclesiast.”

  “You know, Ecclesiast.” Tymar pauses at the edge of the altar. “You talk about worming your way into the natural. Maybe we do.”

  He takes another step. The music wavers and crashes to a halt as he lays a hand on the ebony altar.

  “So did you,” he says.

  He steps around the altar to the shelves of the Library.

  “The Book of Commencings.” He plucks the tome from the library and turns. “Three-seven. Thus did the love of the keeper enfold the Children of Eqt, and forth the bounty of that love rose from their joyful union. In the beginning, before legs or lungs or eyes to see, the Children of Eqt had no keepers.”

  “Blasphemy.” Multraq’s is the only other voice in the stunned silence. “If you mean to say—“

  “This is your sacredness, Excellency.” Tymar lays the book open on the altar with a thunderous thud. “The first Commencing. The convergent evolution of Eqtoran and keeper, folding two primordial species into one.”

  Grant glances at Ruaq and Ipqen, who stare at the unfurling words with rapt horror. It makes sense, he realizes. This three-way thing can’t have just sprung forth fully formed. Long ago, the keepers were once a totally different species.

  “And so is your sacredness ours,” Tymar says. “You keep the faith. You sing your songs. Within you is the power to bring forth life in the Children of Eqt. By these truths you are made Ecclesiast.”

  He tugs the golden robe from the altar with a gleaming flourish. He lays it across his own shoulders.

  “And so am I.”