than the labyrinths of the Splendid Paradise of the Crystal River, as the denizens of Purdimal ironically named the oldest and most dilapidated section of their city.
If ever there had been a paradise here, it lay buried beneath millennia of rotting bricks and slums and offal, and the Crystal River was no more than a brownish slough that wound through slimed, turgid canals out to the Water Gate and thence into the swamps to the west of the town.
Harsan lay back upon the narrow ledge to look up at the curve of the roof-comb that bellied out above his head, a huge cylinder of mortared masonry some four man-heights in diametre set horizontally along the highest summit of Lord Hrii’u’s Shrine of Evanescent Change as a thick log might be laid upon a stool. The stained and dingy stone was deeply pockmarked with hollow bubbles, some tiny and others the size of a man’s fist. Tlayesha said that it reminded her of a loaf of black bread, baked by some legendary baker for a feast of the Gods. The ornate sculptures of the comb were chipped and wind-worn, and one of the five tall spires that rose from its summit had fallen-five hundred, a thousand years before? No one remembered. The masonry itself was webbed with cracks, each lush with its own miniature garden of scabrous moss and russet fungi.
One day it would collapse. Then perhaps a score or more of the priests and the wretched poor of Purdimal’s Splendid Paradise would perish beneath the cyclopean blocks. No matter! the Imperium would take the calamity in stride. Taxes would be raised in this province or that; carts laden with materials would arrive; engineers would scribble upon parchments and dangle their plumb-bobs; and legions of priests, scribes, and toiling slaves would come to build it all back up again. A new temple of Lord Hrii’ii, the mightiest of the Lords of Change, would rise upon this spot, and all would be as it had ever been.
Across the way, beyond the plaza named the Court of Cries, the. cupolas of Lord Ksarul’s pyramidal temple rose like some leviathan of the sea from amongst the wrack of tenements and steep-pitched tile roofs. The wind brought them the distant thunder of drums and the shriek of trumpets from the esplanade behind it. Today the red- robes of the Temple of Vimuhla rejoiced and paraded there in New Town: their favoured Legion, that of the Lord of Red Devastation, had led General Kettukal’s armies to victory in the deserts north of Khirgar. News had also come from General Korikada hiKurushma of the Legion of the Givers of Sorrow, fanatics devoted to Lord Vimuhla’s Cohort, fierce Chiteng. His forces had sent the Yan Koryani back north in headlong flight from before the gates of Chene Ho in the far northwest. It was indeed a day of heady glory for the followers of the Flame. Prince Mirusiya, the latest of the Emperor’s heirs to be declared, would be pleased.
Already the smoke of burning arose from the truncated cone of the Flame Lord’s shrine in the distance. Yan Koryani captives would go chanting-or screaming, or pleading, as their Skeins allowed-into the fire-pits there, and the city would stink of roasted meat and entrails for a time. The Gods would rejoice, the priests said, although one might well wonder just how many times in history the victory pyres had been lit and how many men and women had died to please these, the grimmest of the Lords of Change.-And all for different and probably contradictory causes!
The wind was in their direction. Harsan had no desire to await the smoke and the stench. He stretched, wrapped his kilt about his waist, and began rolling up the reed sleeping mat upon which he had been sitting. Tlayesha still slept, nude and ruddy-bronze in the shadow of the roof-comb, upon her mat beside him. His loins stirred, and he thought of making love one more time before going down. The clash of cymbals and a sustained, wordless, lusting roar from the crowds in New Town drifted up to him, and he decided against it. He ran a finger along the curve of her calf instead.
“Come, it is time.”
She woke, then, and reached up to him. Even now he found himself surprised and a little unsettled by her sky-hued eyes, paler still in the westering sunlight. He changed his mind again and sank down beside her. After all, what was the hurry? The breeze would not bring unpleasant smells for at least a few moments yet.
She was not, Eyil-how long had it been-since that one had walked in his dreams? Tlayesha was not as deft and skillful in her love-making. She did not play upon each nerve and each touch in turn, as Eyil had drawn forth melodies from the Sra’ur of his body. Sometimes Tlayesha was inept; sometimes she hurried on before him; and at other times she could not keep up with his own eager impatience.
Yet she was Tlayesha. It was enough.
He helped her gather up her clothing, her mat, and her little urn of soothing oil. Together they descended the bronze-runged ladder that led down through the thick walls of Lord Hrii’ii’s ancient temple, along the galleries of carven friezes that hung high over the apse below, and on into the maze of ventilation shafts that would take them home.
The purple-robed priests of the Master of the Lords of Change never looked up. They would have been most upset if they had known what had just transpired upon the roof of their temple. But they were mostly old, fusty, and as devoted to their rituals as a Chlen — beast who plods round and round upon the threshing floor. This temple was not like the splendid new shrine to Lord Hrii’u over in New Town. None but the aged, the unambitious, the seekers of solitude, and those who had been passed over for lack of talent ever served here. Worshippers in this section of Purdimal were the ragged poor, the halfbreed mixtures of human and Heheganu, and the flotsam of the slums. Those who sought power and riches-the young, hard-eyed clergymen, the great scholars and sorcerers, the high pontiffs with their retinues of guards and scribes-rarely came to this place.
Harsan was not sure just where the ventilation shafts of the pyramid left off and the warrens of the Undercity began. There were no streets in the Splendid Paradise, just intricately confused layers of little passages, rooms, and scruffy halls of pockmarked stone or rotting brick. It had taken him all of the many months since his recovery to learn his way about the maze. Families, some human, some Heheganu, some mixtures, and some-other- hung up mats and curtains and made their homes wherever they chose. No one cared. No Imperial bureaucrat came to ask questions or demand proof of ownership. This was the Splendid Paradise, after all.
Down, left, right, down again, through the hall where the legs of colossal statues rose like columns to the ceiling, their bodies and heads gone or entombed forever in the masonry of later structures above. The occasional shafts of bloodied sunlight gave way to the orange-red twinkle of rush-candles. The ramshackle curtains of the human poor were replaced by the loose-woven reed mats of the Heheganu. No search party could ever find its way down here, the Old Ones said: the mats and curtains were made to be shifted and rehung in a matter of moments, altering the plan of these warrens beyond recognition. What were rooms could become passages; what were twisting subterranean alleyways turned into interlocking warrens of hovels and cubicles; and all was changed. In the whispering darkness the children of the Old Ones squatted on their haunches to stare solemnly at passersby as they had done for more centuries than were recorded in any book of histories.
The sweet, rotting, sickly stench of dead flowers struck Harsan like a wall. Here the many varieties of Tsuhoridu were made, the most precious liqueurs of Purdimal and of all Tsolyanu. He helped Tlayesha down into the corridor beside the rows of stone vats. Gangs of human slaves and some of the Old Ones stirred a cauldron of Aluja as big as a room: the most strongly perfumed of all of the Tsuhoridu vintages, it was rumoured to deprive a man of his virility if more than a thimblefull were drunk each day. There bubbled the vats of Nezu’un, a grass-smelling essence that gave dreams of unendurable ecstasy; farther were the pots of Siyanukka, sweet-breathed as a child but bringing about the decay of the mind as surely as the clouds brought rain; beyond stood the green-corroded copper stills of the vendors of Diqonai, swamp-smelling and acerbic, providing an illusion of physical strength that the nobles of the Five Empires vied to obtain. A bottle of undiluted Diqonai no bigger than one’s palm sold for a thousand Kaitars in the marketplaces above.
Torchlight glistened upon sweating shoulders, furnaces flared in the glassblowers’ shops down the way where the bottles and vials for the liqueurs were made. Over all hung the distant, rhythmic thump-sigh-thump of the great bellows, worked continually by gangs of chanting slaves, that brought in fresh air and kept this metropolis of no night and no day alive.
Harsan stepped carefully over the bodies of the Meratorayal, the Woeful Seekers: men, and women, and others who lay beside the vats to lick up the spilled drops of the precious essences. These were the true derelicts, tolerated by the vintners, chained here by the bonds of their addiction more tightly than any prisoner in the Tolek Kana Pits. Some, he knew, had once been noble, clansmen and women of status; now they lay like beasts beside the dribbling cauldrons, certain to die of starvation or of their wretched habit within a few months at most. There were always others ready to fight, to kill, to take their places.
The Old Ones had given them a dwelling place just behind the workshops of the bottlers. It was cramped, no more than a triangular alcove between the soot-encrusted foundations of two ancient Engsvanyali mansions, the upper storeys of which had later been levelled, razed, and roofed over during one of the Ditlana ceremonies of the
