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good mop boy. But he’d learn. He always did. And there was a mop with his name on it waiting for him at Markko’s—His Honor to the fighters, apparently—cottage.
    When Llesho returned to the cottage, the overseer was sitting behind the desk folding a sheet of paper. Bixei had arrived ahead of him, and was standing at Markko’s right hand with a message pouch hanging from a strap that crossed from his left shoulder to his right hip.
    â€œI won’t be needing you for the rest of the morning,” Markko said without looking up. He gestured at a tray with a teapot and plate of broken biscuits on the corner of his desk. “Take these things with you, I’ve finished with them. And, after you have mopped the barracks to Master Jaks’ satisfaction, come back here. I may have something for you to do then.”
    Bixei looked down on him with haughty disdain while Llesho collected the overseer’s breakfast things, but something in the look and the posture made Llesho wonder what he was so afraid of losing. If Bixei wanted to be Markko’s servant, he was welcome to the job. The least of Thebins made poor ones of it—they were a proud people, but mostly proud of their independence, which they had nurtured and protected for generations on their mountaintops. Until the Harn had come. Unfortunately, Thebins also made poor soldiers. Llesho was going to change that, but not as a servant to a second-rate official in the employ of Chin-shi, Lord of Pearls.
    Something of what he was thinking must have communicated itself to the golden boy, because the haughty pride slipped a bit. But Markko had a rolled-up paper to go into the pouch, and Llesho ducked away without attracting further notice.

Chapter Five
    TWO weeks after he made the trek from the pearl beds to the gladiator’s compound, Llesho took his place in the barracks with a bachelor group who showed no interest in him for conversation or anything else. He had grown skilled in the use of the mop and bucket and the prayer forms were coming more easily to him.
    As Llesho began to understand the forms, his respect for his teacher grew as well. Built like a mountain, with the warmth of the summer sun in his eyes, the humble washerman was the very image of the Laughing God, who had not walked the earth, it was said, for many human generations. Nor would he return while the Harn held the gates of heaven.
    Den’s attention seemed everywhere, while his body and soul centered into the action: sinking his weight into the ground for the earth forms, and flowing through the water forms. In the air forms, he seemed almost to take flight, which should have looked absurd on his large body, but didn’t. When he demonstrated the water forms, Llesho caught glimpses, like double vision, of Kwan-ti at her workbench. She mixed elixirs and shaped little pills in his mind’s eye as Den moved from position to position. Llesho knew to trust the almost-visions that left impressions, like intuition, in their wake. Experience had taught him to keep the flashes to himself, but he determined to watch the teacher carefully, and found comfort in the memory overlaid upon the washerman’s movements.
    He had realized on that first embarrassing day that the prayer forms demanded freedom of him. His body could not soar with heart and soul tied to the slave block and his chains. To succeed, he must free that part of him the gods owned. So each morning as the students lined up with the least experienced in the front, he found his place quickly. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to imagine himself at home among the mountains that rose above Kungol, the capital city where he was born. His brother, Adar, had kept a clinic in those mountains. Llesho remembered the cold, thin air that forced a human being to move cautiously so close to heaven, and the measured, gentle movements of the healer. He imagined Adar at his back, guiding him through the motions of the