Page 29 of The Sunlit Man

“Because it is the way that his city, Union, will come anyway, once their harvest is finished,” she explained. “Why would we be so foolish as to fly directly into his path? His riders usually search the far reaches of this corridor and those nearby, presuming to find us there, attempting our own harvests.”

They fell silent.

“You can’t flee to another corridor?” Nomad asked. “You said there are places he can’t influence?”

“He influences all,” she said, “but there are some places he doesn’t care about—because they are inhospitable.” She pointed northward. “Travel up that way an hour or so, and it’s all his territory until you reach the deadband, where food does not grow. To be exiled there is a death sentence.”

She turned, pointing south. “The southern band used to be habitable, but a mountain range has sprung up these last few years. It gets higher and higher. Like I said, while individual features vanish, some large-scale ones persist. We keep hoping this mountain range will melt away, but it hasn’t, and so all the people in that corridor had to relocate northward—crowding these corridors. Giving the Cinder King more sway because it is easier to oppress them.”

“Wait,” Nomad said. “Why is a mountain range a big deal? Just fly over it.”

“We can’t fly that high,” she said. “The ships can’t manage it. And it extends far enough that if you try to go around, you inevitably end up getting caught in some valley and dying. So instead we hide in the darkness and dodge his patrols.”

Nomad found that curious. Their technology…some things about it baffled him. That wasn’t, however, an unusual experience for him. The more he’d traveled, the more he’d learned that technology didn’t follow a flat progression. Planets often had extreme knowledge in one area, but ignorance in others. He’d met one society capable of complex mathematics and with a brilliant understanding of architecture—but with no concept of the wheel, as they lived in a dense jungle, where developing it hadn’t made as much sense as it did in places with a lot of flat land and straight roads.

So, the knight muses, they lived under the Cinder King. That—admittedly—sounds bad. But could it truly be worse than the rest of life on this planet? Was his rule so horrible that going off to live in pure darkness was better?

That depended. In Nomad’s experience, it wasn’t when life was utterly terrible that people rebelled. It instead happened when life improved to the point that people had time to think, time to wonder. The capacity to imagine.

So maybe things here had recently progressed enough to make people wonder if they needed a dictator or not.

“The Cinder King,” Nomad said. “He taxed you? How badly?”

“Badly,” she said softly. “The lottery happened once a rotation.”

Lottery?

Well,therewas a word that varied widely by context. Remembering his experience on Union, he braced himself for the worst. “A…lottery of people?”

She nodded. “What else would it be?”

“And what did he do with them?”

She frowned, studying him. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You…don’t know?”

He shook his head.

“It’s true?” she whispered. “There’s a place where they don’t use sunhearts?”

“The power sources?” he said, rapping his knuckles on the cycle’s housing. “I mean, everyone I’ve known uses power of one sort or another, but I’ve never seen these ones. Where do you get them? Is it…” He trailed off.

Sunhearts.

Lottery.

“People?” he asked. “These power sources used to bepeople?”

“This one here,” she said, resting her hand on the housing, “was my mother. Two weeks ago. We left her for the sun, then recovered her sunheart on the next rotation. Her body vaporized by the heat, her soul condensed into this stone.”

Storms.

Storms.

Suddenly his experiences upon arrival took on an evenmoresinister cast. That’s what the Cinder King had been doing. That’s what the strange game of tag had been about: choosing the next people to be sacrificed to the sun. Not in some primitive, pagan way—but in a modern one. Equally horrible, but with more economics.

That’s terrible, the hero exclaims, imbuing his words with sickened disgust.

It wasn’t unprecedented. Nomad hadn’t been to Nalthis—the place sounded nice, and nice places tended to be easy for the Night Brigade to find—but they bought, sold, and traded chunks of people’s souls like they were gemstones. BEUs as a measurementwere based on this system—though at least there, the transaction left you alive.

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