Kurt went down to his knees and on his face without being forced; despite that a guard held him there with the butt of a spear in his back.
“Let him sit,” said Ylith. “He. may look at me.”
Kurt sat back on his heels, amid a great murmuring of the Indras lords. He realized to his hurt that they murmured against that permission. He was not fit to meet their Methi as even a humble chan might, making a quick and dignified obeisance and rising. He laced his hands in his lap, proper for a man who had been given no courtesy of welcome, and kept his head bowed despite the permission. He did not want to stir their anger. There was nowhere to begin with them, to whom he was an animal; there was no protest and no action that would make any difference to them.
“T’Morgan,” Ylith insisted softly.
He would not, even for her. She let him alone after that, and quietly asked someone to fetch Kta.
It did not take long. Kta came of his own volition, as far as the place where Kurt knelt, and there he too went to his knees and bowed his head, but he did not make the full prostration and no one insisted on it. He was at least without the humiliation of the iron band that Kurt still wore on his ankle.
If they were to die, Kurt thought wildly, irrationally, he would ask them to remove it. He did not know why it mattered, but it did; it offended his pride more than the other indignities, to have something locked on his person against which he had no power. He loathed it.
“T’Elas,” said the Methi, “you have had a full day to reconsider your decision.”
“Great Methi,” said Kta in a voice faint but steady, “I have given you the only answer I will ever give.”
“For love of Nephane?”
“Yes.”
“And for love of the one who destroyed your hearth?”
“No. But for Nephane.”
“Kta t’Elas,” said the Methi, “I have spoken at length with Vel t’Elas. They would take you to the hearth of your Ancestors, and I would permit that, if you would remember that you are Indras.”
He hesitated long over that. Kurt felt the anxiety in him, but he would not offend Kta’s dignity by turning to urge him one way or the other.
“I belong to Nephane,” said Kta.
“Will you then refuse me, will you directly refuse me, t’Elas, knowing the meaning of that refusal?”
“Methi,” pleaded Kta, “let me be, let me alone in peace. Do not make me answer you.”
“Then you were brought up in reverence of Indras law and the Ind.”
“Yes, Methi.”
“And you admit that I have the authority to require your obedience? That I can curse you from hearth and from city, from all holy rites, even that of burial? That I have the power to consign your undying soul to perdition to all eternity?”
“Yes,” said Kta, and his voice was no more than a whisper in that deathly silence.
“Then, t’Elas, I am sending you and the human t’Morgan to the priests. Consider, consider well the answers you will give them.”
The temple lay across a wide courtyard, still within the walls of the Indume, a cube of white marble, vast beyond all expectation. The very base of its door was as high as the shoulder of a man, and within the triangular rhmei of the temple blazed the phusmeha of the greatest of all shrines, the hearthfire of all mankind.
Kta stopped at the threshold of the inner shrine, that awful golden light bathing his sweating face and reflecting in his eyes. He had an expression of terror on his face such as Kurt had never seen in him. He faltered and would not go on, and the guards took him by the arms and led him forward into the shrine, where the roar of the fire drowned the sound of their steps.
Kurt started to follow him, in haste. A spearshaft slammed across his belly, doubling him over with a cry of pain, swallowed in the noise.
When he straightened in the hands of the guards, barred from that holy place, he saw Kta at the side of the hearth-fire fall to his face on the stone floor. The guards with him bowed and touched hands to lips in reverence, bowed again and withdrew as white-robed priests entered the hall from beyond the fire.