Taelin felt her stomach pitch. She closed her eyes but her balance was off. She had to kneel down. She felt grains of stone roll under her fingers.
Her esophagus clamped down on an airy pressure that climbed up the back of her throat. She got control of it. After a few moments the feeling subsided and her head cleared enough that she risked opening her eyes.
At the edge of the dais stood a man, exceptionally tall and pale, wrapped in a single luxurious heap of long dark fur. His feet were similarly booted to the knee. He was talking with a journalist who had just ended the conversation by saying something she couldn’t parse in a loud, cheerful voice. Then the journalist and his shoulder bag turned in her direction. He smiled at her, raised his bulky camera and snapped a litho.
Caught for all time: kneeling at the temple of Sena Iilool.
She struggled to her feet and rested a moment. The man in the fur wrap came over. He smelled of overly sweet perfume and his smile was too symmetrical, like something coming out from behind a mirror.
“May I help you?”
Taelin pushed her goggles back into her hair. “Yes, I’m wondering if you … if your congregation … if your
“You smell like apples.” He looked down at her with lavender eyes, deep-set under yellow brows.
Taelin scowled. She wanted to tell him that he smelled rather cloying himself but she wasn’t interested in a pissing contest. “Is that right? You people believe she’s a god? Goddess? Whatever?”
The man said, “Belief is not required.”
“This is a temple, isn’t it?” said Taelin.
The man’s smile diminished but his eyes almost incandesced in the sunlight. “We do not answer questions here.” His head was shaved but a nap of blond velvet covered his pure white skull.
“You’re not interested in converting anyone?”
“No.”
“Can I look around?”
“Yes. But please, do not disturb the colligation.”
“What’s a colligation?” Her father being a lawyer, she understood a colligation of facts used to support an argument but …
“We do not answer questions here.”
“Oookay. I’ll just look around then.” She gave him a smile that he did not return.
The dais hovered twenty feet behind him. She wanted to crouch down and look under the bottom step, discover if the whole massive thing were really floating, but to do so felt childish.
Instead she walked toward it, set one foot on the impossibly smooth monument and stepped up. As she did, she felt her nausea return momentarily. Just a flicker at the bottom of her stomach.
She paused, then climbed the other two steps and passed one of the red veils.
The scene that greeted her sent her vision rolling. Among the snapping silks knelt a stunning host, mostly pale Pplarians. They faced north, knees on cushions of scarlet embroidered with black. In front of each worshiper stood a two-foot amphora of dark glass. The mouths of the amphorae were wider than their bellies, spun into broad funnels by whatever glassblower supplied them.
To the right of each worshiper knelt a man or woman in red silk who assisted them through the act of oblation: inserting the needle, depositing the other end of the vacuum tube into the mouth of the amphora. Taelin watched in horror as row after row of phlebotomists methodically went through the venepuncture, then bandaged up their patients and helped them lie down, heads on the pillows that had previously cushioned their knees.
Once their patients were comfortable, the phlebotomists raised smaller silver amphorae, spilling liquid from these sparingly into the larger vessels before capping the tall black amphorae with ornate lids.
Young vergers with silver trays of fruit, drinks and biscuits glided the spiral aisles.
Eventually the devoted were led out along the spiral and a new worshiper was guided in to take their place. The turnaround was slow; people trickled in and out. They seemed to both come from and disappear toward the region farthest from where Taelin stood.
Taelin watched as a phlebotomist lifted one of the black amphorae. She clutched it close to her body with both arms, and hauled it north to yet another dais where she ascended three more steps and entrusted her burden to a muscular Pplarian. He in turn labeled and hung it at a forty-five-degree angle from a magnificent silver scaffold. It swung gently with others that had been filled and made Taelin’s stomach hurt.
None of the worshipers spoke, but Taelin could hear even above the snapping silks, the dribbling echoes of the hollow amphorae, the colligation, the vast sound of blood collecting drop by drop, which she now realized had to be linked somehow, impossibly, to Sena’s use of holomorphy.
It was not so cold here. Whatever the custard-colored dais was made of, Taelin could feel a mild warmth coming off it. The whole thing repulsed her. She backed out of the temple, down the steps and nearly into the towering Pplarian who had snuck up behind her.
Her fear, both at the Pplarian’s sudden proximity and the memory of what she had just seen, boiled out as anger. “How … what are you doing here?”
The man’s face twisted like white plastic at the edge of a fire. Taelin backpedaled, nearly falling in her effort to widen the distance between them. His words barely reached through her shock and horror. “The Omnispecer is not like you,” he said. “Axioms do not require belief.”
Taelin gaped. One of his lavender eyes glared at her, bulging and cycloid while the other seemed to have been sucked back into his head, partly hidden by a wrinkled sphincter of bleached flesh.
His grin returned, broad and venomous.
“We do not answer questions here,” he called out to her as she turned, still stumbling, dashing for the stairs.
CHAPTER
5
Caliph woke with a silverfish on his face. How it had survived the cold, he didn’t know. Nor did he know what time it was. He was wrapped in a blanket (another mystery) with the leather desk chair reclined beneath him like a sling. The muscles in his neck had stiffened. He rolled forward, chair tipping upright, and noticed a fire burning on the hearth.
Clearly, his staff had found him.
He picked up the book that had fallen to the floor. Curiosity about the characters in the journal drove him to find the next entry.
Arrian Glimendula lived roughly twenty thousand years ago. Scholars place her at nineteen thousand, nine hundred fifty years old, give or take a year or two. My ruined estate in Khloht, overgrown with seventy years of jungle is still new by comparison. My poisoned servants are fresh gossip, sweet golden dates rotting in the sun. In the company of such a beast of legend, I am nothing. In this, I take comfort … despite the fact that it is a lie.
With sweet shuwt tinctures I was there, inside of her as I have been inside of others. My sense of self is muddy. As is my sense of time. I look out through Arrian’s eyes, see and sense Corwin’s adolescent frustrations. When Arrian met the woman on the ship Corwin stayed in the shadows, watching. After a while, he turned and marched up the coast, skipping stones into the Loor. The woman was Ublisi. She had come to Soth carrying the Red Book.
By then, the
