The inner doors opened to admit them, thundered shut after. They faced a spiral ramp, and with the priest and four of the escort bearing torches from the doorway, they began their ascent. The ramp led slowly about a central core with doors on this side and that, and echoes rang hollowly from the heights above. The whole of the place had a dank and musty smell, a quality of wet stone and age and standing water. The corridor floor was uneven, split in not a few places, with cracks in the walls repaired with insets of mortared rubble. The guards kept close about them the while, two torchbearers behind and three before, shadows running the walls in chaos. Behind them was the fading sound of voices from the gate; and softly, softly as they climbed, began to come the strains of music, strange and wild.
The musics grew clearer, uncanny accompaniment to the iron tread of armed men about them; and the air grew warmer, closer, tainted with sweet incense. Jhirun was breathing as if she had been running, and Vanye also felt the dizziness of exhaustion and hunger and sudden heat; he lost awareness of what passed about him, and cleared his senses only slowly as the guards shifted about and encountered others, as soft voices spoke, and doors opened in sequence before, them.
The music died, wailing: golden, glittering figures of men and women paused in mid-movement, tall and slim and silver-haired.
Qujal.
Jhirun’s touch held him, else he would have hurled himself at guards and doors and died; her presence, frightened, at his side, kept him still as the foremost of the tall, pale men walked toward him, surveyed him casually with calm, gray eyes.
An order was given, a language he did not know; the guards laid hand on his arms and turned him to the left, where was another door; and certain of the other pale lords left their places and came, quietly, as they were withdrawn from that bright hall and into an adjoining room.
It was a smaller hall, with a fire blazing in the fireplace, a white dog lying at the hearth. The dog sprang up and began to bark frantically, sending mad echoes rolling through the halls, drowning the music that had begun again next door, until one of the guards whipped her yelping into silence. Vanye stared at the act, jarred by that mistreatment of a beast, and looked about him, at wealth, luxury, carved woods, carpets, bronze lamps—and the qujal-lords gathered by the door, resplendent in brocades and jewels, talking together in soft, astonished accents.
Three moved to the fore, to seat themselves at the chairs of the long table: an old man, in green and silver, he it was who had come first to look at them—and because he was first and because of his years, Vanye reckoned him for lord in the hall. At his right sat a youth in black and silver; at his left, another youth in blue and green of fantastical design, whose eyes were vague and strange, and rested in distant speculation on Vanye’s when he looked him in the face. Vanye flinched from that one, and felt Jhirun step back. His impulse even now was to run, deserting her, though guards and chains and double gates lay between him and freedom: nothing that could befall Jhirun in this place seemed half so terrible as the chance that they would realize what he was, and how he had come.
Morgaine’s enemies: he had come her road, and set himself against her enemies, and this was the end of it. They stood studying him, talking together in whispers, in a language he could not understand. A black-robed figure edged through that pale and glittering company, past the scale-armored guards, and deferentially whispered to the seated lords: the priest, who deferred to qujalin powers.
They have lost their gods, Morgaine had told him once; yet here was a priest among them. Vanye stood still, listening to that whispered debate, watching: a priest of demons, of qujal—this he had trusted, and delivered himself into their hands. The room grew distant from him, and the buzz of their soft voices as they discussed him was like that of bees over a Kurshin meadow, the hum of flies above corruption, the persistent rush of rain against the shuttered windows. He grew dizzy, lost in the sound, struggling only to keep his senses from sliding away.