Sara Douglass – The Serpent Bride – DarkGlass Mountain Book 1

had enjoyed privilege and honor. Now he was nothing but an amusement at the Corolean court.

He drifted through the court, getting himself involved in some of the more minor and less bloody

of its schemes, taking lovers here and there, getting drunk with various other adventurers and lost

souls, and avoiding all the other Icarii at the court like the very plague.

They reminded him of everything he had lost. Most particularly, their ability to fly

reminded him very painfully that he no longer had his wings. StarDrifter had spent two centuries

soaring over the peaks and plains of Tencendor. Now he lived as a cripple: an Icarii with no

wings was nothing, and he loathed those who could still soar. In truth he did not have to do much

to avoid them, for there were relatively few Icarii at the court.

There were a thousand or so spread around Coroleas, at the universities and larger cities,

and some haunting the Jai Alps to the south, but most were nauseated by the bloody immorality

of the court and shunned it whenever possible.

Hate it as he might, StarDrifter could lose himself within the court, within its shadows

and intrigues and its habit of never asking too many questions. He could drift and exist, hate and

intrigue, and somehow hope to forget his empty life.

Today was one of the more interesting—and for the slaves in the Palace of the First, one

of the most dangerous—days in the yearly cycle of court activities. It was Fillip Day.

One of the privileges that the First claimed for themselves was the right to play the

ancient game of Fillip. The game epitomized everything StarDrifter loathed about the Corolean

court—its blatant sexuality, its carelessness of life, its utter superficiality, its dark plots—but for his own terrible, bitter reasons, StarDrifter felt the need to attend.

Normally Fillip was played in the utmost privacy and, for Corolean standards, with great

discretion. But on this one day of the year it came out of the closet and was celebrated in the

Diamond Colonnade, the general gathering hall for the court (as opposed to the Emperor”s Hall

for more formal occasions), whose columns and vaulted ceiling were literally smothered with

diamonds set in gold. The colonnade was massive, running almost two hundred paces east-west,

open at both ends so that it caught both the rising and setting sun, and with star-shaped glassed

openings in the vaulted roof that allowed in the noon light.

The colonnade glittered and sparkled every daylight hour.

StarDrifter thought it looked cheap.

He arrived in the colonnade at mid-morning, by which time most people who were going

to attend had already arrived. Every one of the Forty-four Hundred First Families had several

representatives present, and in some instances the entire family had decided to attend; members

of the Second were only rarely invited. The emperor—an almost obscenely fat man clothed in

several glaring shades of silk and far too much bulky lace for the warm morning—was in

attendance, as was his empress and half a dozen of his official concubines. Most of the

adventurers and hangers-on of the court were here, as were almost two thousand of the Third, to

serve and indulge the First.

Yet even so, the Diamond Colonnade was not crowded.

StarDrifter strolled down one of the side aisles, hands behind his back, an expression on

his face that discouraged any from engaging him in idle conversation. Despite the

inapproachability of his demeanor he was a very striking man, almost beautiful. Tall and lean, yet of a muscular build, StarDrifter was clad in fitted cream breeches and shirt, which set off his

close-cropped golden hair, high-cheekboned face, and blue eyes. He walked with a slow, lithe

grace, rather like a dancer, yet with the calculated precision of a hunter.

His feet were bare save for plain gold rings about each of his big toes.

StarDrifter”s clothing was in remarkable contrast to most of the other people in

attendance. The Coroleans generally loved bright colors, floating fabrics, and as many jewels as

they could fit on their bodies. Most of their gowns were belted, and from these belts hung small

bronze figurines, each about the size of a woman”s finger. The richer and more important the

bearer, the more bronze figurines they had jangling about their waists; the colonnade was alive

with the sound of jangling bronze.

They were small deities. The Coroleans collected them assiduously, believing that the

more bronze deities they carried about their person the better protected they would be from life”s

mishaps, the better health they would enjoy (and the better able they would be to escape the

various sexual diseases that infested the Corolean court), and the more luck they would bring

upon themselves and their families. The more devout among them also collected half-sized

deities that they inserted into bodily cavities, the better to warm the bronze figurines and engage

their magical abilities. Looking at the crowd, StarDrifter thought he could see several people

walking with that peculiarly pained gait which suggested they carried more bronze within their

flesh than dangling from the outside of it; it was not unknown for Coroleans to die from

perforated bowels and wombs due to crowding in one too many deities.

StarDrifter would have regarded the Coroleans” obsession with the bronze deities as little

more than pathetic save for one thing: the manner in which the deities were created.

The Third contained within their number a subcaste of elite bronze workers whose guild

was controlled tightly by the Thirty-eight Thousand of the Second. The bronze workers made the

myriad small bronze shells to house the deities. These bronze shells were then transferred to the

care of a caste of priests, known as the God Priests, within the Second, where they were offered

up for sale to members of the First and the Second. As yet the bronze shells had no power

associated with them at all—the purchaser also had to buy a deity to inhabit the shell. It was the

responsibility of the God Priest to infuse the bronze shell with the god, which then created the

bronze deity.

StarDrifter thought the entire thing epitomized everything he believed wrong with

Corolean society: hopelessly complex and contrived, and mostly entirely morally valueless. But

of everything, it was the manner in which the bronze shells were infused with the resident god

that sickened StarDrifter and fed his contempt of everything Corolean.

The God Priests empowered the figurines by infusing them with the soul of a man,

woman, or child. It was this soul that then gave the figurine its godlike powers. If the soul came

from a man with great physical strength, then the deity would impart physical strength to its

wearer. Whatever the most dominant trait of the soul-giver, thus the dominant trait of the bronze

deity. StarDrifter had once heard that one of the most sought-after souls were those of assassins;

every Corolean, it seemed, yearned for an assassin deity to work its deadliness on the bearer”s

enemies. Another soul greatly valued was that of the newborn baby—one who had not yet taken

suck. This soul was treasured for its purity and strength, and Coroleans believed a bronze deity

infused with this kind of soul imparted long, vigorous life to the bearer.

None of these souls were freely given. They were taken from the bodies of the living in

horrific religious ceremonies conducted by the God Priests, who drew the soul from the living

body in a process they extended over as many hours as possible, and which they made as painful as possible for the soul-giver. Only thus, they argued, would the soul retain all its strength for the bronze figurine it was to inhabit.

It was the mass of slaves and condemned criminals who provided the souls. The

soul-givers were picked for their qualities, and wives never knew when their husbands might not

return, or when their newborn infants might be snatched from the midwives” hands for the God

Priest pits, or when they themselves might be selected as suitable souls for a bronze figurine.

They were snatched from their homes, from the streets, from their beds at night, and they lived in

such abject hopelessness that few of them ever struggled against their fate.

Today there was a huddled, miserable group of them set on a dais partway down the

colonnade.

They were here to participate in the game of Fillip.

StarDrifter”s carefully constructed mask of remoteness and inapproachability faltered as

he stood to one side of the dais and looked at the wretched slaves. There were perhaps fifteen of

them: one older man, several males in their prime, two heavily pregnant women, two male

youths, three girls in their mid-teenaged years, two toddlers, and two swaddled babies laid on the

floor.

Newborns.

StarDrifter”s face went very still as he looked at them. Like all Icarii he loved children:

partly because Icarii found it so difficult to fall pregnant themselves, partly because they simply