Puppy when Aphrael’s riding on his back.’
‘Are you feeling belligerent just now?’
‘I don’t like being led around by the nose, but it’s nothing
specific. You’ve overtrained me, Vanion. Any time anything
unusual comes up, I start getting ready for war. Faran can feel
that, so he does the same.’
Xanetia and Kalten were leading them across the meadow that
sloped down toward the glowing lake and the strangely alien
%town nestled un the riear ~hure. The pale Delphaeic woman
still glowed with that eerie light. The radiance surrounding her
seemed to Sparhawk’s heightened senses to be almost a kind of
aura, a mark more of a special kind of grace’ rather than a loathsome
contamination.
‘It’s all one building, did you notice that?’ Talen was saying
to his brother. ‘It looks like any other city from a distance, but
when you get closer, you start to see that the houses are all
connected together.’
Khalad grunted. ‘It’s a stupid idea,’ he said. ‘A fire could burn
out the whole town.”
‘The buildings are made of stone. They won’t burn.’
‘But the roofs are thatch, and thatch will burn. It’s a bad idea.’
Delphaeus had no separate wall as such. The outermost
houses, all interconnected, turned their backs to the world, facing
inward with their windowless rear walls presented to the
outside. Sparhawk and the others followed Xanetia through a
large, deep archway into the city. There was a peculiar fragrance
about Delphaeus, a scent of new-mown hay. The streets were
narrow and twisting, and they frequently ran through the buildings,
passing under heavy arches into vaulted corridors which
emerged again on the far side. As Talen had noted, Delphaeus
was all one building, and what would have been called streets
in another town were simply unroofed hallways here.
The citizens did not avoid them, but they made no particular
effort to approach. Like pale ghosts they drifted through the
shadowy maze.
‘No torches,’ Berit noted, looking around.
‘No need,’ Ulath grunted.
‘Truly,’ the young knight agreed. ‘Notice how it changes the
smell of the place? Even Chyrellos always reeks of burning pitch
eVeN in the daytime. It’s a little strange to be in a city that
doesn’t have that greasy smoke clinging to everything.’
‘I don’t think the world at large is ready for self-illuminating
people yet, Berit. It’s an idea that probably won’t catch on particularly
in view of the drawbacks attached to it.’
‘Where ‘are we going, Lady?’ Kalten asked the pale, glowing
woman at his side. Kalten’s situation was a peculiar one.
He guarded and protected Xanetia. He was solicitous about her
comfort and well-being. He would, however, be the one who
would kill her at the first sign of hostility from her people.
‘We go to the quarters of the Anari,’ Xanetia replied. ‘It is he
who must place our proposal before Anakha. Anakha holds the
keys to Bhelliom, and only he can command it.’
‘You could have saved the rest of us a lot of trouble and made
this trip alone, Sparhawk,’ Talen said lightly.
‘Maybe, but it’s always nice to have company. Besides, if you
hadn’t come along, you’d have missed all the fun. Look at how
entertaining it was to jump off that cliff and lounge around in midair
with about a thousand feet of absolute emptiness under you.’
‘I’ve been trying very hard to forget about that, my Lord,’ the
boy replied with a pained expression.
They dismounted in one of those vaulted corridors near
the center of the city, and turned their horses over to several young
Delphae. The young men looked to Sparhawk like goatherds
who had been pressed into service as stable-boys. Then they
followed the glowing woman to a dark-stained door, worn with
centuries of use. Sparhawk, still in the grip of that emotionless
calm, looked rather carefully at Xanetia. She was not much
bigger than Sephrenia, and, although she was clearly a woman
and quite an attractive one, that fact somehow had no meaning.
Xanetia’s gender seemed irrelevant. She opened the worn door
and led them into a hallway with deeply inset doorways piercing
the walls at widely spaced intervals. The hallway was lighted
by glass globes hanging on long chains from the vaulted ceiling,
globes filled with a glowing liquid – water’ drawn from the lake,
Sparhawk surmised.
At the far end of the corridor, Xanetia paused in front of one
of the doors, and her eyes grew distant for a moment. ‘Codon
bids us to enter,’ she said after a brief pause. She opened the
door, and with Kalten close behind her, she led them into the
chambers beyond. ‘The hall of Codon, Anari of the Delphai.”
she told them in that peculiarly echoing voice that seemed to be
one of the characteristics of her race.
Three worn stone steps led down into the central chamber, a
tidy room with vaulted ceilings supported by low, heavy arches.
The slightly inwardly curving walls were covered with white
plaster, and the low, heavy furniture was upholstered with
%nowyr JamL)’s-vvool. A small fire burned in an arched fireplace
at the far end of the room, and more of those glowing globes
hung from the ceiling.
Sparhawk felt like a crude, barbaric intruder here. Codon’s
home reflected a gentle, saintly nature, and the big Pandion was
accutely cOnscious of his chain-mail shirt and the heavy broadsword
belted at his waist. He felt bulky and out of place, and
his companions, wrapped in steel and leather and rough, gray
cloth, seemed to loom around him like the crude monoliths of
an ancient and primitive culture.
A very old man entered from the far side of the room. He was
frail and bent, and his shuffling steps were aided by a long staff.
his hair was wispy and snowy-white, in his case the mark of
extreme age rather than a racial characteristic. In addition to his
unbleached wool robe he wore a kind of shawl about his thin
shoulders.
Xanetia went to him immediately, touching his wrinkled old
face with a gentle hand. Her eyes were full of concern for him,
but she did not speak.
‘Well met, Sir Knights,’ the old man greeted them. He spoke
in only slightly accented Elenic, and his voice sounded thin and
rusty as if he seldom had occasion to speak at all. ‘And welcome
to thee as well, dear sister,’ he added, speaking to Sephrenia in
nearly flawless, though archaic, Styric.
‘I am not your sister, old man,’ she said, her face cold.
‘We are all brothers and sisters, Sephrenia of Ylara, High
priestess of Aphrael. Our kinship lies in our common humanity.’
‘That may have been true once, Delphae,’ she replied in a voice
like ice, ‘but you and your accursed race are no longer human.’
He sighed. ‘Perhaps not. It is hard to say precisely what we
are – or what we shall become. Put aside thine enmity, Sephrenia
of Ylara. Thou wilt come to no harm in this place, and for once,
our purposes merge into one. Thou wouldst set us apart from
the rest of mankind, and that is now also our desire. May we
not join our efforts to achieve this end?’
She turned her back on him.
Itagne, ever the diplomat, stepped in to fill the awkward gap.
Codon, I presume?’ he said urbanely.
The old man nodded.
‘I find Delphaeus puzzling, revered one, I must confess it. We
Tamuls know virtually nothing about your people, and yet the
Delphae have been central to a grossly affected genre in our
literature. I’ve always felt that this so-called “Delphaeic literature”
had been spun out of whole cloth by’ third-rate poets with
diseased imaginations. Now I come to Delphaeus and find that
all manner of things I had believed to be literary conceits have
more than a little basis in fact.’ Itagne was smooth, there was no
question about that. His assertion that he was even more clever
than his brother, the Foreign Minister, was probably quite true.
The Anari smiled faintly. ‘We did what we could, Itagne of
Matherion. I will grant thee that the verse is execrable and the
sentimentality appalling, but “Xadane” did serve the purpose
for which it was created. It softened and turned aside certain of
the antagonisms the Styrics had planted in your society. The
Tamuls control the Atans, and we did not wish a confrontation
with our towering neighbors. I cringe to confess it to thee, but
I myself played no small part in the composition of “Xadane”. ‘
Itagne blinked. ‘Codon, are we talking about the same poem?
The “Xadane” I studied as a schoolboy was written about seven
hundred years ago.’
‘Has it been so long? Where do the years go? I did enjoy my
stay in fire-domed Matherion. The university was stimulating.’
Itagne was too well trained to show his astonishment. ‘Your
features are Tamul, Codon, but didn’t your coloration seem odd?’
‘Ye Tamuls are far too civilized to make an issue of deformity.