Wenyanga almost bumped into the back of Thula as they shut the door. Their beloved stood only a step in the room, body frozen midstride, eyes wide with surprise. Wenyanga looked up at the bed. Standing at the foot of it, swathed in layers of thin pink-red robes, face hidden under a silk cowl so large it drooped over the shoulders, was a Seer. Wenyanga didn't need to open their stoneiris to know that their soul was Perfect.

Even under the silk cowl, her stoneiris glowed like a diamond in the sun.

The Desert of the Middle Spire had a robust metric for measuring the power of a soul. A soul was judged to be Crude if it had taken on the shape of its craft. A warrior was Crude level when their soul was shaped into a single ring of fire around their core. If they were Refined, they'd forge a second ring, and master the first. A Near Perfect warrior had three rings, two mastered in the tools of combat. A Perfect warrior, theoretically, was the peak of a combat-driven soul for most people, having mastered the soul to peak efficiency. Seers, similarly, were marked by their mastery of the second spiritual organ: the stoneiris.

A Perfect Seer hadn't just learned how to observe the spiritual plane or honed their natural senses beyond human comprehension. They had transformed their stoneirises into something other, capable of manipulating souls themselves. That alone made them more dangerous than any warmage of similar power and development. A Perfect warmage could cut a temple with the casual swing of a sword. A Perfect Seer could command every worshipper inside to hold their breath to their death.

As such, they were respected beyond chiefs and even monarchs. All social graces, all courtesies, all lessons of manners taught to children started at one root: never offend a Seer.

Wenyanga placed their hand on Thula's shoulder, severing the Seer's hold on her soul. Thula took in a deep breath and shuddered. Sanele must have known the Seer was here, because he slinked into the room, went down to his knees and bowed over two fists pressed to the flour. Even with a dying Judge around, the chief waited for his guest to address him.

"Respected Seer," Wenyanga said first, bowing at the waist, "the honour is ours to know your presence. But try that again and I'll cut your head off and eat it."

The Seer's cowl twitched, and Wenyanga braced themself against the weight of her gaze. Her attention alone put an elephant on their chest, and the blood in their head felt thick is cold honey. Three of the rings on their left hand glowed.

"I am Mehlo le Langa," the Seer said. Her voice was flat, unemotive if not a little hoarse. It filled the whole room. "Praise me and earn forgiveness."

"I'll pass." Wenyanga bent to pick up Thula's giant medic kit.

A hand painted in black clay grabbed their wrist. After a moment, the pink-red sleeve rippled lightly. Quick... for a Seer. Wenyanga tried to straighten, but their hand may as well have been encased in a block of cement. When the Seer tightened her grip, wrist bones shifted. With a sigh, Wenyanga began peeling a piece of their soul.

"Respectfully," Thula said, wringing her hands, "I think the Seer would be wise to let us attend her beloved."

Her beloved? Wenyanga cast their gaze to the Seer's other hand -- her heart hand -- and scrutinised the bangle on her wrist, a copper band braided with woven paper. Lightning fizzled in the depths of the copper, a faint blue light... dying. Wenyange plastered over their soul and relaxed. The Seer's grip did not.

"You're welcome to take out your anger over not being able to protect him on me later," they said. Then, with sincerity, "But only later, when you've no guilt to hold you back, Parreh."

The Seer flinched at the last word. As far as Wenyanga was concerned, she hadn't earned the endearment, but they were one who had lost and she was one who was losing. They'd both earned the fight bubbling between them, but empathy was fair too at times. The Seer's fingers twitched. Wenyanga slipped their wrist free, and the two of them straightened together until they were eye to eye.

The Seer's cowl had slipped halfway behind her ears, revealing a smooth face that had soaked in the sun to a deep richness, brown eyes set like old jewels within finely-wrought features. She still wore her anger, though it was tempered with the closest thing to uncertainty a Perfect Seer could muster, so her stoneiris shone like a new star inside the crease of her brow.

"I still expect an apology peer to your insult," she said. She tugged her cowl in place a little too sharply.

Wenyanga flexed the fingers on their free hand. "I know you do. Now let's see him, time's running and we aren't."

"If the Seer would deign to answer," Thula said, "is... is the Handler nearby?"

"Salleh," she said. "Your respect has earned my name, which is Salleh. And no, our Handler still pursues the pettygod. You may lay your hands on my beloved without fear."

"Mighty charitable."

Wenyanga reached down for Thula's medical kit, before it flew up on its own. It smacked into their shoulder with enough force to crack the wood, and as it floated over to Thula's side, Wenyanga met the Seer's gaze, and that damned stoneiris that flared just a little when the kit set itself down.

Tello's laughter spun through Wenyanga's thoughts. I would bet on the pettiness of a Seer before the power of even a voidgod.

Before even the life of their beloved, it seemed. Somehow, Wenyanga couldn't muster the appropriate amount of disgust. They were many things, but not a hypocrite. Besides, the Seer had already moved to the side of the bed, pulling up the pink-red veil so Thula could dip under it. Sighing, Wenyanga followed.

Slipping under the bed's silk veil was like walking into an ocean. A cool pressure pressed against Wenyanga's flesh, and their vision went dark until they were fully through the threshold. Only then did they note how Salleh's volumnous silk robe matched the veil's, as though they were cut from the same cloth. The pink-red dye seemed to move between them as though they were still one. Those brown eyes locked onto Wenyanga again, and there was a hint of mild satisfaction in how the Seer's stoneiris flashed.

Sanele may have enough control to keep a patch of sand from shifting, but I'll be a worm's teeth if she's not holding every fibre of silk on her robes in place with her mind.

Such control was beyond every other Perfect Seer Wenyanga had come across. That reduced Salleh's origin, or at least where she'd studied, to three places. A look at the bed confirmed which one.

A large man lay naked on the bed, his breathing so shallow that his mountain of a chest barely stirred. He had the deep complexion of one raised in the desert, his beard a coarse, wooly black mass around a half-open mouth. A fist-sized hole at into his gut, just below his liver, and a white light shone out it, casting the bed in silver. Suspended in the air above the wound, a long-handled hammer spun, reflecting the light bleeding out of the Judge's soul.

In theory, a Judge was only a shade below a Pettygod in power... but that was theory, and he was human. He's already dead, he's just still breathing so it'd be impolite to say so.

When he coughed, Salleh moved to his side and wiped the flecks of blood from his lips with a pink-red kerchief. Her right hand was clean, the skin a rich brown. But her heart hand, hidden up to the knuckle by a voluminous sleeve, was painted pure black, as if she'd dipped it in true midnight.

"How much of that soul clay do you have?" Wenyanga asked.

Salleh frowned. "No more than a cupful, and that took a year for me to make. How much would you need to save him?"

"Save him?"

The Seer flinched, and if not for how bright it had been a moment ago, Wenyanga might not have noticed how it dimmed a little.

Wenyanga adjusted one of the rings on their heart hand. "I'm not being spiteful, but I can't save him. His soul... it's like looking at a severed arm with nothing to cauterise it. But..."

"Don't say it." The warning in Salleh's voice came with a Perfect's consequences behind it.

"Look, Sanele knows I'm no healer and Thula is a doctor of the flesh, not spirits. Looking at your beloved, he was just too afraid to tell you what you need to hear. That's on him as a chief. What I can do is save your beloved's soul.

"You can pickle it in a jar, is what you mean. Store it like some rare herb to sell to a rich potion maker."

"Or a talented soul artist. You didn't forge a Perfect soul without eating a few spirits yourself, and by the shape of things, your mentor wasn't short on the wealth to afford the very best pickled spirits."

"You know nothing of me. I'm not a book to be read, especially by a Crude soul."

"Of course you are, I just skimmed to the interesting bits. Now do you want your lover's soul or not? It might be the elixir you need to push your soul to Pinnacle."

"Wenyanga," Thula hissed, kicking open her kit, "enough of this. We've a job."

Salleh's hand rested on her beloved's forehead for a long moment, thumb gently brushing between his brow, where his stoneiris would be.

"I will take his soul back to his mentor," she said at last. "It is hers before mine."

Putting it lightly. Most things are hers before anyone else's.

With that settled, Wenyanga readied themselves for a thankless task. No, it was worse than that. They'd performed soul surgery only a week ago... or at least tried.

Just get on with it, it's not like you're about to watch Tello's soul spill through your fingers again.

Wenyanga stepped forward, and five of their rings flared as they stepped into the light of the Judge's soul. Again that light glinted off the polished head of the hammer. A black symbol had been engraved on one side, reflecting no light. A temple hanging from the clouds, flanked by two curved spires.

The symbol that marked the hammer as the property of the Judge's mentor: the Paramount of the Desert.