He went outside. Glancing down the street to the left, he stared into the Plaza of the Sun, to see if the Acknowledgers had come back to it to dance again. No, the plaza was deserted. He touched his hand to his throbbing forehead, bent, scooped up a few fingers’ worth of snow, and rubbed it against his brow. That was a little better.

It was almost dawn. The wind howled unabated. But the snow was ceasing, now. It mantled the ground to a surprising depth. He couldn’t recall a snowfall this heavy in thirty years. Was that why those people had come out? To dance in it, to rejoice over the strangeness of it?

Acknowledgers, he thought. Acknowledgers.

I have to speak with Athimin about them in the morning.

He ascended the wall and stood for a long while at the window of his pavilion, staring out into the bleakness of the southern plains, until his mind was utterly void of thought and his aching body had yielded up some of the tautness of its tense muscles. Eventually a pink light began to appear in the east. This whole night has been a dream, Salaman told himself. Feeling strangely unweary, as though he had passed into some state beyond even the possibility of fatigue — or as though, perhaps, he had died without noticing it, somewhere during the night — he went slowly down the stairs and rode back through the awakening city to the palace.

Athimin was the first to come to him that morning as he sat enthroned, waiting in eerie tranquility, in the Hall of State. There was something odd about the prince’s movements as he approached the throne, something hesitant, that Salaman didn’t like. Ordinarily Athimin carried himself in a burly, decisive way, as befitted the next-to-oldest of the king’s eight sons. But now he seemed not so much to stride as to skulk toward the throne, giving his father wary glances as though peeping at him over the top of an arm that was flung defensively across his face.

“The gods grant you a good morning, father,” he said, sounding oddly tentative. “They tell me you didn’t sleep well. The lady Sinithista—”

“You’ve talked to her already, have you?”

“Chham and I breakfasted with her, and she seemed troubled. She told us you’d had a profound dark dream, and had gone rushing out in the night like one who’s possessed—”

“The lady Sinithista,” Salaman said, “should keep her royal mouth shut, or I’ll shut it for her. But I didn’t ask you here to discuss the nature of my dreams.” He gave the prince a sharp look. “What are Acknowledgers, Athimin?”

“Acknowledgers, sir?”

“Acknowledgers, yes. You’ve heard the term before, have you?”

“Why, yes, father. But it surprises me that you have.”

“It was in the night just past, also, one of my many adventures this night. I was outside the guardhouse near the Plaza of the Sun, and I looked down the street and saw lunatics dancing naked in the snow. Biterulve was with me, and I said, ‘What are those?’ and he said, ‘They are Acknowledgers, father.’ And he could say nothing more about them than that. You’d be able to give me better information, he told me.”

Athimin shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. Salaman had never seen him like this before, so uncertain, so restive. The king began to smell the smell of treachery.

“Acknowledgers, sir — these dancers you saw — these people you rightly call madmen—”

“Lunatics is the word I used. Those who are driven mad by the Moon. Though there was precious little moonlight visible through the driving snow while they were dancing. Who are these people, Athimin?”

“Unfortunate strange folk is what they are, whose minds have been turned by drivel and nonsense. They are just such folk as would dance when the black wind blows, or frolic naked in the snow. Or do many another strange thing. Nothing fazes them. They hold the conviction that death isn’t important, that you should never at any time care about risk, but just do whatever seems right to you, without fear, without hindrance.”

Salaman leaned forward, gripping the armrests of the Throne of Harruel.

“So this is some new philosophy, then, you say?”

“More like a religion, sir. Or so we think. There’s a system of belief that they teach one another — they have a book, a scripture — and they hold secret meetings, which we have yet to infiltrate. We’ve only begun to understand them, you see. The sapphire-eyes folk seem to be what they most admire, because they stayed calm when the Long Winter was coming on, and were indifferent to death. The Acknowledgers say that this is the great thing taught by Dawinno the Destroyer, that we need to show indifference to dying, that death is simply an aspect of change and is therefore holy.”

“Indifference to dying,” said Salaman, musing. “Acceptance of death as an aspect of change.”

“That’s why they call themselves Acknowledgers,” Athimin said. “The thing that they acknowledge is that death can’t be avoided, that it is in fact the design of the gods. And so they do whatever comes into their heads to do, father, regardless of risk or discomfort.”

Salaman clenched his fists. He felt fury rising in him again after these hours of early morning calmness.

So the City of Dawinno wasn’t the only place plagued by an absurd new creed? Gods! It sickened him to hear that such madness was loose virtually under his very nose. This could lead to anarchy, this cult of martyrdom. People who fear nothing will do anything. And worship of death wasn’t what his city needed. What was needed here was life, nothing but life, new flowering, new growth, new strength!

He rose angrily to his feet.

“Insanity!” he cried. “How many such lunatics do we have in this city?”

“We’ve counted a hundred ninety of them, father. There may be more.”

“You seem to know a great deal about these Acknowledgers.”

“I’ve been investigating them all this month past, sir.”

“You have? And said not a word to me?”

“Our findings were only preliminary. We needed to know more before—”

“More?” Salaman bellowed. “Madness is spreading like a pestilence in the city, and you needed to know more before you could tell me even that such a thing exists here? I was to be kept in the dark about it all? Why? And for how long? How long?”

“Father, the black winds were blowing, and we felt—”

“Ah. Ah, I understand now.” He stepped forward and brought his arm up in the same instant, and struck Athimin ferociously across the cheek. The prince’s head rocked back. Sturdy as he was, he nearly lost his balance at the force of the blow. For an instant there was fiery rage in the younger man’s eyes; then he recovered, and took a step away from the throne, breathing heavily and rubbing the place where he had been struck. He stared at his father with a look of utter disbelief on his face.

“So this is how it begins,” said Salaman very calmly, after some moments. “The old man is considered so unstable, so easily deranged, that during the troublesome season he has to be kept from learning of significant developments that have occurred in the city, so that he won’t become so upset by them that he’ll take unpredictable action. That’s the start of it, shielding the old man from difficult knowledge at a time of the year when he’s known to behave rashly. The next step is to shield him even from the mildly disturbing things, so that he’ll never feel any distress at all, for who knows? He might be dangerous when he’s troubled in any way, even the slightest. And a little while after that, the princes gather and conclude among themselves that he’s become so capricious and volatile that he can’t be trusted even in the times of calm weather, and so he’s gently removed from the throne, with the softest of apologies, and sent to live under guard in some smaller palace, while his eldest son takes his place on the Throne of Harruel, and—”

“Father!” Athimin cried in a strangled voice. “None of this is true! By all the gods, I swear that no such thoughts have entered the minds of any of—”