"Can you have good memories of bad people?" Kelam muses, with a melancholy smile.

'Or good memories of being a bad person?' she thinks, and the silent addendum chills her blood.

She turns her attention to the food as a distraction. She finds the plantain fufu somewhat lacking in isolation, but once she grasps how the starch is meant to be eaten with the soup (which is as spicy as promised, but wonderfully rich and creamy), the meal comes alive.

"This is good!" she enthuses, happy to find herself enjoying the tastes of her girlfriend's homeland.

Between the warm, spicy soup filling her belly and the sweltering confines of the little restaurant, however, her armor is turning into an oven. As sweat plasters her bangs to her forehead, she finds herself wishing that she'd been willing to relax her vigilance enough to wear lighter clothing ashore. If there's any bright side to her suffering, however, it's that the embarrassment of public bathing has begun to sound significantly less unpleasant than spending any more time swimming in her own sweat.

"Well as long as he doesn't think he can party with us," Kelam says, laughing, "Let's go see that temple."

~ ~ ~

The worshippers' trails up Borosintaba, the Bull's Mountain, are long and meandering, but not steep, and Leaf and Kelam both have remarkable endurance. Sweat still beads on Kelam's brow simply from the heat, but the climb itself is not taxing. The path taken by the couple is a lesser-used one, and it reaches the summit some distance from the bathing pools at the temple's main entrance, so they chat amiably as they travel around the Fane's outer ring of eternal flames and the ceremonial gardens which fill the space between the blazing pillars. As the entrance draws in sight, however, they encounter an unexpected crowd...

Brown Leaf's accounting of the Fane's general functioning, and of Kirighast's festivals, both the approved holidays of the Immaculate calendar and its traditional, local celebrations, was not wrong. Her memory is nearly flawless, and she is well acquainted with the rhythms of Harborhead's life.

Memories of the past, however, are poor tutors in the matter of current events.

The hundred spouts of the ritual bathing fountains of the Fane of the Upswept Horns are in use at the moment. All of them. A young woman in the prime of her life stands under each stream, cleansing herself with sober efficiency. Each of the Five Peoples is well-represented among their number, and they are not organized along tribal lines, but intermingled. In skin-tone, hair, height, even in build they vary greatly, but all of their bodies, whether long and lean, short and stocky, or somewhere in-between, are uniformly well-muscled, and they are further unified by their steely focus and their sense of shared purpose.

The Brides of Ahlat prepare for holy war.

A loose human cordon of temple acolytes stand outside the bathing area, warning off other visitors. Surprisingly, a few Immaculate novices are mixed in amongst their number, their eyes very carefully averted from the exposed flesh of the god-loving heretics preparing to enter Ahlat's temple. One seizes on Leaf and Kelam's arrival as a welcome diversion from whatever images may be filling his thoughts and strides nearer.

Leaf knows him. Not well... all the novice monks she knew well have departed from this world... but she met him when she visited Kirighast's monastery. He was a novice then, too, with little enough promise that his lack of advancement in the intervening period isn't shocking. She knew him by the rather elaborately ignominious temple name "Rooster-in-Flight." He's Izhalvi, given to the temple after his father lost everything short of his own freedom to a cattle raid.

"You cannot visit the Fane today," Rooster says with the confidence of borrowed authority, "Preparations are being made to confront the..."

His prepared speech trails off, and his eyes shift away from Kelam, whose obvious foreignness initially drew his attention, to focus in on Brown Leaf.

"...wait, do I know you?"