A short corridor, ceiling dripping, into a broader transept, across a dingy mosaic floor, down a second corridor, this one lined with niches, each home to a holy object — misshapen chunks of raw ore, crystals of white, rose and purple quartz and amethyst, starstones, amber, copper, flint and petrified wood and bones. At the end of this passage the corridor opened out into a wider colonnaded main chamber, and here, arrayed in two rows, waited acolytes, each wearing brown robes and holding aloft a torch.
The acolytes chanted in some arcane tongue as the High Priest led Mappo down between the rows.
Where an altar should have been, at the far end, there was instead a crevasse in the floor, as if the very earth had opened up beneath the altar, swallowing it and the dais it stood on. From the fissure rose bitter, hot smoke.
The sad-faced High Priest walked up to its very, edge then turned to face Mappo. ‘Burn’s Gate awaits you, Trell.’
Mappo approached and looked down.
To see molten rock twenty spans below, a seething river sweeping past.
‘Of course,’ the High Priest said, ‘what you see is not in this realm. Were it so, Darujhistan would now be a ball of fire bright as a newborn sun. The caverns of gas and all that.’
‘If I jump down there,’ Mappo said, ‘I will be roasted to a crisp.’
‘Yes. I know what you must be thinking.’
‘Oh?’
‘Some gate.’
‘Ah, yes. Accurate enough.’
‘You must be armoured against such forces. This is the ritual I mentioned ear shy;lier. Are you ready, Mappo Runt?’
‘You wish to cast some sort of protective spell on me?’
‘No,’ he replied, with an expression near to weeping, ‘we wish to bathe you in blood.’
Barathol Mekhar could see the pain in Scillara’s eyes, when they turned inward in a private moment, and he saw how Chaur held himself close to her, protective in some instinctive fashion as might be a dog with a wounded master. When she caught Barathol studying her, she was quick with a broad smile, and each time he felt as if something struck his heart, like a fist against a closed door. She was indeed a most beautiful woman, the kind of beauty that emerged after a second look, or even a third, unfolding like a dark flower in jungle shadows. The pain in those eyes only deepened his anguish.
Cutter was a damned fool. Yes, there had been another woman — his first love, most likely — but she was gone. Time had come to cut the anchor chain. No one could drown for ever. This was what came of being so young, and deftness with knives was a poor replacement for the skill of surviving everything the world could throw in the way. Longing for what could never be found was pointless, a waste of time.
Barathol had left his longing behind, somewhere in the sands of Seven Cities. A sprawl of motionless bodies, mocking laughter disguised as unceasing wind, a lizard perched like a gift on a senseless black-crusted hand. Moments of madness — oh, long before the madness of the T’lan Imass in Aren — when he had railed at remorseless time, at how
Those two words had begun a chant, then stride by stride a gleeful echo, and they had lifted to a roar in the raiders’ camp, amidst screams and the clash of iron; lifted, yes, into a deafening maelstrom that crashed inside Barathol’s skull, a surging tide with nowhere to go.
He could have chanted for ever, but he had left no one alive. Oh, a dozen horses that he gave away to a caravan some days later, a gift for taking in the half-dead warrior, for treating his raging fever, for cleaning his wounds and burning out infection. They would accept no payment for their efforts — they could do nothing for the bleak anguish in his soul, they explained, and so to ask for anything would be dishonourable. Now a gift, well, that was different.
In the desert nothing disguised time’s cruel face. Its skin was stretched to the bone, its lone eye burned the sky and its gaping mouth was cold and airless as a mountain peak. The traders understood this. They were as much a tribe of the desert as anyone, after all. They gave him bladders of water — enough to take him to the nearest garrison outpost ‘
