Adam was thankful when they were finally gone. A word from Jordan was all it took, “Vexillifer Mephistopheles,” and the King’s Sons granted them entry into the sea of commerce southwest the Tarshir gate. At a glance, the Mephistine bazaar made even the vast Gautaman markets look to be less than a Babylonian slum. There was no aspect of gradation. Where on one side of the walls stretched a flat valley of sand, immediately inside sprung gardens atop apartments atop taverns and shopfronts, streets and alleys like veins and arteries through which human beings flowed as far as the eye could see. And the scent of them was sweet as perfume: spiced musk, roses, lavender, and honey. Their clothes, their bodies, their roads immaculate like porcelain dolls: sculpted, painted, jeweled with rings of silver and gold, robed in silks bright as gemstones. They turned away their noses; riders, palanquins, and pedestrians all the same gave a wide berth to the motely companions and their fetid camels. Muckrakers glared at them from the shade of alleyways. Leaning on their shovels like soldiers do with spears, the boy toilers fermented memories in Adam worse than the Royal Swordsmen. Clean, kempt captives—slaves in everything save appearance—like Magdalynn.
The pastor’s son forced his eyes forward. He couldn’t see much farther ahead than the street was wide—too many twists in the roads and arcaded bridges between the tops of buildings. But looking above, their destination rose clear. King Solomon’s Temple, the seat of his power, stood at the city’s center an ashen hexahedron toothed with gilded merlons and ribbed with white columns. But the closer the companions drew, the thicker became the crowd and narrower the streets so that they had to pass in single file through a labyrinth of alleys. More than once, Adam worried that they’d lost their way. They’d circled the Temple’s outskirts twice, and it wasn’t obvious that they were gaining ground. If anything, it seemed to him that they were blindly following the flow foot traffic, and these were no longer pristine porcelain dolls. These people were smeared and broken. Every one of them walked as if on a cliff’s edge, despondent or vigilant. They made Adam nervous, made him notice the dearth of Royal Swordsmen and the dark nooks under arcades and the dead-end alleys each tenanted by grotesque bronze statues half man and half beast. Compared to these, the glare of muckraking child-slaves seemed a happy sight.
Suddenly, the line stopped. Adam rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, called out, “What’s wrong? Why did we stop?”
The answer came from ahead in the column. “We’ve reached the end of the line,” said Zachariah. “Looks like we’ve come at a bad time. I don’t think it was ever this long when I was here on mission.”
“Line for what?” asked Adnihilo. “I thought we were going to see the king.”
Ba’al yawned and stretched his arms. “That’s what the line is for, Imp. All that studying in Iisah didn’t make you any quicker, did it?”
“Quick enough to knock you off this camel.”
The bishop scoffed, and they went back and forth prodding one another with petty threats and insults until the hour could no longer bear their boredom. They’d advanced perhaps twenty paces—another hour, twenty more—yet still the doors of the temple remained obscured from the tight winding streets. Hunger was starting to set in, and sickness at the odor of their camels’ excrement left to putrefy in the alley without muckrakers to clean it. And the Mephistine in line did not fail to notice. They grumbled openly in bitter Tsaazaari; some even spat and turned to leave, squeezing passed the stubborn lingerers so that, as day slipped into evening, Adam and Lilum became the last two in line.
Last in line yet farther ahead. By the end of that third hour they’d more than tripled their pace and were coming to a corner around which Adam was sure they’d be able to see the temple directly. One step at a time, one step per minute, they approached the bend with mounting tension—then relief! A group of sixteen Mephistine abandoned their places somewhere down the line, and with their passing the whole serpentine thing lurched. The companions turned the corner and beheld before them a garden enshrined by crenulated walls: white slabs and gilded merlons like atop the temple proper. Only now that they stood close, Adam saw they weren’t merlons at all but statues like those of bronze inside the alley. Abominations. This garden was tainted, the pastor’s son felt so horribly that he was glad to see that the line, though diminished, yet ran longer than could possibly be attenuated in a single day. They—the tail: Adam, Adnihilo, Lilum, Ba’al and the apostles—lay a ways outside the doorless garden gates; within, the body coiled a dozen times over; the head chopped off one man at a time by a company of King’s Sons with arbalests at the ready. Behind them, the doors to King Solomon’s Temple hung open—but not to them.
In the end, it was agreed they would try again the following morning. The Mephistine were not known for early rising, and so they’d share for the final time a camp together—or perhaps it’s better said for the first time they would share a roof. Jordan was the one who invited them to join him and his apostles. They were to take refuge at the sole Messai chapel allowed to stand inside the
