The two Asadi warriors reappeared at the precise moment the Asadi pagoda itself jumped into existence for us.
When two green flames on either side of the temple’s hung wooden doors burst into view, we saw what had previously been invisible to us. The pagoda stood where before there had been only shadow. After slipping into that shadow, our two Asadi warriors had mounted the steps fronting the temple in order to light the iron flambeaux near its massive doors. Once lit, the green flames not only made the torchlighters visible again but drew the substance of the pagoda itself into a viable alignment with the strangely polarized light of the triple moons and the Wild’s psychotronic polarization of our Asadi and human perceptual abilities. Some dormant energy inside the building had responded to the firing of the torches by negating the concealing polarizations of light and perception outside it. As a consequence, the temple had leaped into view like a television picture springing fullblown from a blank but highly sensitized screen. It happened almost like an explosion, but one with neither flash nor din.
The Asadi reacted by lifting their arms, shaking their heads, and falling back a step or two.
Elegy and I reacted by embracing and stooping to the ground together, as if a shower of sparks and debris might come cascading out of the air upon us. No chance of that, though. We were simply being given the chance to see what had existed in the clearing for the lifetime of the pagoda occupying it. We were seeing what Egan Chaney had seen before the light- and perception-polarizing powers of the structure, programmed into it a million or more years ago for enemies other than human investigators, had again plunged the temple into invisibility – as a direct consequence, apparently, of Chaney’s trespass and The Bachelor’s lunatic vandalism.
The pagoda was . . . well, magnificent. It combined the architectural qualities of several terrestrial styles from several historical epochs. Its central dome, of a weirdly translucent marble or travertine, recalled those on Islamic mosques, while a narrow spire rising from the dome might have been anything from a lightning rod to a radio antenna. The gem-shingled wings of the five successively smaller roofs, going from bottom to top, suggested the religious towers of Buddhist and Hindu Asia. From the outermost tips of all five wings hung reedlike tubes of several shapes and lengths, Instruments through which the wind had once been free to concoct melodies that the temple had long since either muted or stopped. The flutes and bassoons, I told myself of Chaney’s fevered ‘imagination.’ The stone tier rising to the Gothic doorway was Roman, while the panes of opaque violet glass set like monstrous but wafer-thin amethysts at intervals in the spaces between the top three roofs had no Earthly analogue at all. They did have the imperviousness of basilisk eyes, though, and they shimmered and changed in the moonlight as if a viscous colored liquid were oozing down their backsides in the pagoda’s interior. The building, which had once been sleeping, was alive – alive and expectant.
‘There it is, Ben.’
Elegy’s voice conveyed no smugness, only wonder and childlike belief. The verdigris coating the temple’s facade – coating, too, the bas-relief carvings running like bredework in the stories between the lower two roofs and the high entablature – in no way degraded the temple in her sight.
She eased herself out of my embrace and stood. ‘They’re carrying him up to the funeral scaffold,’ she whispered, pointing, and as I, too, stood, I saw six of the smaller Asadi bearing Kretzoi up the temple’s steps to a carven stone catafalque. Here the corpsebearers laid Kretzoi out with a care approaching reverence, then took up positions behind the bier and faced their shaggy, shuffling people.
For the Asadi had begun to do ritual combat with BoskVeld’s moons, now no longer in perfect conjunction, Balthazar having moved retrograde to the other two and Caspar having outpaced Melchior to the west. Not all of the Asadi took part in this pantomimic warfare, just a sufficient number to make shadows dance in the clearing.
‘The huri designates the chieftain’s successor,’ I told Elegy, shaking off my awe. ‘And our huri’s incapable of that. Our entire elaborate ruse breaks down at this point, Elegy.’
‘Let’s see, Ben. Let’s see.’
We must have waited – yes – another two or three hours as Kretzoi stoically bore the inconvenience of his ‘death’ and lay unmoving on the catafalque. The moons were finally so far apart that two of them had fallen beneath the artificial horizon of the trees, Caspar west and Balthazar east. Melchior, more distant, dallied, but the Asadi dropped their snouts from its contemplation and began moving about the clearing just as they moved in their daylight clearing.
And it was now, Elegy and I both knew, that the dead chieftain’s huri ought to come flapping above their heads in deadly earnest to decide a successor. It would dive into the throng and thrash an unsuspecting Asadi to its knees with merciless wing beats. The Asadi so chosen, usually a ‘mute,’ would have to separate itself from the others and keep body and soul together not only through limited photosynthesis, but also through the midnight cannibalization of its conspecifics and their hidden meat-siblings.
Elegy squatted and picked up the artificial huri she had carried with her from the other clearing. It was deflated now; a tiny, collapsed umbrella.
‘You planning on throwing that among
