If the jungle of Abonia was the chaotic origin of all living things, then this place — Swettenham Pier — was the order that the Solarians had carved out of the world by force, with iron and stone.

  Rohan followed Keling on unsteady feet as they stepped onto streets paved with great flat slabs of rock. His toes, trained to grip and read the earth, found nothing to hold onto here — the surface was hard, perfectly level, and cold, and it gave him the unsettling sensation of walking on something that wasn't quite real.

  Noise.

  That was Rohan's first impression of the harbour. Not the living rhythm of cicadas and birdsong he had known in the forest, but something dense and dull and grinding — a low mechanical roar laced with the friction of metal on metal. Enormous black smokestacks rose among the stone buildings, vomiting dark grey clouds into an otherwise clear blue sky. In the distance, vast wooden crates were being unloaded from ships that sat on the water like floating mountain ranges, while Solarian overseers' whistles cut through the air in rapid, overlapping bursts.

  Rohan walked with his neck pulled in, his eyes wide with a child's raw fear. Then a sudden, heavy drumming of hoofbeats broke the street's rhythm. He watched as several enormous four-legged creatures with coats the colour of red copper came thundering past, hauling heavy black wooden carriages behind them. White breath plumed from their nostrils, and each hoof-strike on the stone sent tiny sparks skittering outward.

  "What are… those?" Rohan's body moved backward on instinct. Nothing in the jungle had ever radiated force quite like that.

  "Those are called horses, Rohan." Keling placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. "They are creatures from the other side of the ocean."

  "Stop watching the horses. Look up."

  Rohan looked up.

  The buildings towered above him, their walls studded with windows made of countless pieces of transparent crystal — glass — that caught the sunlight and flung it back in sharp, blinding angles. To Rohan, each window was like the eye of a god: cold, imperious, looking down on this wild child from an unimaginable height.

  Keling led him through the entrance of a white stone building with an air of formal gravity.

  The air inside was saturated with a concentrated sweetness, as though the essence of countless flowers had been wrung out and held captive in the room. Rohan was brought into a chamber so white it made him dizzy — the floor was smooth as crystal tile, and on one wall hung an enormous silver face that reflected the shapes of everything in the room back at you.

  Rohan went rigid in front of that silver face.

  Who is that?

  The figure in the mirror — coated head to foot in black, dried bloodscabs, hair tangled like a thornbush, eyes threaded through with red — was that really him? That boy who had once wanted to be the greatest hunter in the tribe?

  In that moment, an emotion he had never felt before — something called shame — moved over him like a tide of cold water, and submerged him completely. In this white, ordered room, he felt like a pile of filth left on a sacred altar, so foul that his presence was fouling the very air around him.

  "Take these off, Rohan. Take off the past." Keling stood behind him, and in his expression there was no disgust — only something like a father's grief.

  Several servants entered without a sound. Rohan stiffened — they were Ezan. Every one of them. The same skin tone, the same deep-set eyes as his own people. But they wore no totem markings. They kept their heads bowed, dressed in simple, rough white cloth shifts, and their eyes held the flat stillness of a stagnant pool.

  "Clean this gentleman up." Keling gave the instruction in that Solarian tongue with its note of polished authority.

  The servants did not use stream water. They turned a brass fixture, and hot water poured from it in a steady flow, carrying some fragrant, almost sacred steam. Rohan was pressed down into an enormous white porcelain basin.

  What followed was the most painful and the most intoxicating experience of his life. The servants worked a coarse, grainy block of soap across his skin, scrubbing away the crusted blood, the dried mud, and the slick sensation that had lived in the cracks of his fingers since his brother died — working it all loose, piece by piece.

  The water went from clear to dark. Then, slowly, clear again.

  When Rohan stood up from the basin, he felt so light he thought the wind might take him. The armour of earth and grime that had covered him for years was gone, and beneath it was his own skin — deep bronze, the muscle underneath it solid and clean.

  When he stood before the silver face again, Rohan did not recognise himself at all.

  The figure in the mirror wore a sharp black uniform, its collar fastened so high and tight that he had no choice but to stand straight. His matted hair had been cut and shaped, his forehead clear. Apart from the face itself — still marked by the jungle in ways that wouldn't wash away — he looked, in every other respect, no different from Keling.

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  "Now," Keling said, stepping forward to smooth Rohan's collar with careful hands, "you look like a person."

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  In the days that followed, Rohan was given a room in the stone building.

  The nights here held no howling of wild animals, no bloodthirsty insects. Instead, there were transparent globes mounted on the walls, each one enclosing a faint but constant flame. Rohan would lie and stare at those flames for long stretches, unable to understand how these white giants had managed to trap fragments of the sun inside glass.

  Keling came to share every meal.

  Silver forks and small knives were set on the table. Keling taught him how to cut the elaborately prepared portions of meat with a degree of grace — not tearing at them with his teeth like an animal. He taught Rohan the basics of the Solarian tongue, and drew him into long discussions about the shape of the world.

  "What do you make of this place, Rohan?" Keling asked quietly over dinner one evening.

  Rohan set down the heavy silver fork and turned to look at the lit-up streets outside the window. "There is no wind here. No sound of the gods breathing. It's quiet — quiet enough to frighten me."

  "That is because there is order here." Keling cut through a portion of meat pie covered in sauce, his voice measured. "In the jungle, everyone lives inside fear. You feared the Odsu. The Odsu feared the mother bear. The mother bear feared starvation. You called that chaos 'nature.' I call it savagery."

  "Savagery?" Rohan's brow furrowed. The word was new to him, but it carried a contempt that needed no translation.

  "Savagery is head-hunting without end. It is struggling in the mud like an animal. It is losing someone you love and being able to do nothing except howl." Keling set down his own utensils and looked directly at Rohan. "And civilisation is the wall we have built for ourselves out of stone, iron, and intelligence. Inside that wall, we can count the hours on a pocket watch. We can wear clean clothes. We can stop fearing that the next breath will be our last because a spear has found our throat."

  Rohan thought of his brother.

  "If my tribe had walls like these… would my brother still be alive?" His voice broke slightly on the last word.

  "Yes." Keling exhaled slowly, and something genuinely pained moved behind his eyes. "Your brother was a great warrior. But he died from the self-destruction of savagery. It was that primitive jungle that killed him. Rohan — Abonia is not the Land of Divine Punishment. Abonia is only a shadow that the light has not yet reached."

  Something surged through the floor of Rohan's chest.

  Keling's words were working like a precise, delicate blade — cutting, one careful stroke at a time, the last threads connecting him to the place he had come from. He looked at his clean white cuffs, then out at the powerful stone city beyond the glass, and he began to wonder whether those years spent in the Longhouse had really been nothing more than a long and pointless suffering.

  "I want to be strong." Rohan lifted his head abruptly. Something ignited in his eyes — a hunger for power, specific and hungry and new. "I want to master the tubes that spit thunder. I want to wear the metal skin that no blade can cut through. I want the strength to protect whoever is left of my people."

  Keling smiled — the slow, satisfied smile of a man who has been waiting for exactly those words.

  "Good. The Solarian legion welcomes brave young men like you."

  ————————————————————————————————————————

  Rohan enlisted in the Solarian reserve forces.

  The training was severe. He traded the black uniform for a stiff military one. He no longer learned how to stalk a moon bear through tree-shadows — he learned how to dress ranks in a square formation, how to maintain the heavy, cold, oil-smelling matchlock muskets that the Solarians carried.

  In the early weeks, the gap in language and custom made him the target of mockery from the other soldiers. They called him monkey. They called him mud-whelp.

  In another time, Rohan might have launched himself at them with a snarl. But under Keling's guidance, he had learned patience. He practised his shooting alone on the drill ground late into the night. He sat in the cramped barracks and struggled his way through the shapes of Solarian letters until his eyes ached.

  Gradually, he began to understand that he was not inferior to these white giants at all. His eyesight was sharper. His endurance ran longer and deeper. The first time he squeezed the trigger and felt the tremendous shock travel through his shoulder, and watched a wooden target a hundred paces away explode into fragments — the feeling of holding that power in his hands, the feeling of having claimed a miracle for his own — undid him completely.

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  One day, Keling came to Rohan's room and saw the Kris lying on the desk.

  That blade — carrying within it blood debts and grief and the ruins of everything Rohan had been — looked profoundly out of place among the clean, uniform angles of the stone room. Keling picked it up. His fingertip traced the carved crimson deity-hilt with a slow, light touch, and something dark and unreadable crossed his expression for a moment. Then he set it back down without a word.

  After coming to the harbour, Rohan did not pick up the Kris for a long time. He even began to feel, somewhere in himself, that this old thing made of ancient wood and iron was beneath comparison with the fire-breathing powder-tube in his hands.

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  As time passed, the guilt inside Rohan genuinely began to ease.

  Life at the harbour ran on a steady, busy rhythm. The morning bugle. Midday drills. Evening walks along the quayside with Keling. He began to find his footing inside this life — one where he no longer had to fight for his next meal — began to understand the structure of the thing they called society.

  He even made a few Solarian friends. They still carried that particular brand of ingrained superiority, but they would share a cold bottle of malt ale with him in the tavern and tell him about the continent on the other side of the ocean — a place, they said, full of gold and wonders beyond imagining.

  Rohan felt, for the first time, that he had come through something.

  He looked at the figure in the mirror — straight-backed, composed, in a dark blue military uniform — and felt that the Rohan who had clutched his brother's severed head and wept in the mud of the Manuk sacred ground had died there. Left behind in that black and broken place.

  "Do you see, brother," he said to him quietly, in the place inside himself where only he could hear. "I'm wearing the metal skin now. I have the thunder in my hands. I'll bring the fire of civilisation back — and light up all of Abonia with it."

  He slid open a drawer and pushed the crescent-marked bear hide — taken on the morning his whole world still existed — into its furthest corner. That hide, which had once been the proof of everything he wanted to become, was now, in his eyes, just an old thing that smelled of blood and mud.

  This was the happiest time of Rohan's life.