The intermittent stream of men around Kasimir, intent on thoughts of what they were going to do once they got inside the temple, were ignoring him and the strange light alike. Now more than ever determined to make this mission a success, he rejoined the stream of customers.
Shuffling through the line of impatient customers at the entrance, Kasimir paid his small coin there like everyone else, and as a member of an anonymous throng entered the interior of the temple. At night the public lobbies, lighted by fire, were even redder than during the day. The fires made this part of the building somewhat too warm. Cheerful music throbbed here, played in a rapid tempo by concealed musicians.
On Kasimir’s previous visit he had not penetrated this deeply into the public areas. But nothing here was very much different from any other Red Temple that he had ever visited. Signs, well lighted and elaborately designed, relying heavily on iconography as a courtesy to clients who had trouble with their letters, indicated the way to the various Houses contained within the establishment.
Every Red Temple-at least every one Kasimir had ever seen from the inside, admittedly a comparatively small selection-was divided according to the same basic scheme, into interconnected domains devoted to various pleasures. Here as elsewhere there were the Houses of Flesh, of Food, Wine, Chance, Sound or Music, and Heavenly Vapors. The last was a catch-all category for various entertainments, mostly chemical. Kasimir had heard that in other regions of the world the arrangement varied somewhat, but as far as he knew a Red Temple was basically a Red Temple the world around.
Every time you entered a different House you had to pay another fee, though otherwise it was easy and convenient to pass from one to another. The House of Flesh was on the third floor here, the highest level currently open to the public, and for that reason Kasimir had made it his official goal. As soon as he had paid the rather hefty entrance fee, he was free to climb the winding, recursive stairs, liberally provided with landings and chairs for the benefit of the unsteady devotee who might be coming this way from the House of Wine on the ground level. Kasimir’s was a popular choice tonight, and he had plenty of company on the stairs.
Once having attained the third level, he entered and passed through a large, softly furnished waiting room. Here youthful servants of the temple, most of them female, all of them provocatively clad, waited to be chosen by customers. From this anteroom corridors branched off, and Kasimir chose one under the icon of a staring eye. Ignoring low-voiced invitations from the employees on the benches, he went that way alone. According to the directions he had received at the last minute from Almagro, his way to the private regions of the temple lay through the Hall of Voyeurs.
The Hall of Voyeurs was almost dark. At regular intervals small, very narrow corridors branched off from it. Closed doors blocked off several of these passages, meaning that they were occupied, each probably by only a single worshipper. Kasimir had never entered a Hall of Voyeurs before, but as he understood the arrangement, the walls of each branching corridor were pierced by numerous peepholes, opening into a selection of lighted rooms. In these rooms servants of the temple, joined sometimes by exhibitionistic customers, were more or less continuously engaged in a variety of sexual performances.
Ignoring the opportunities presented by empty observation posts, Kasimir went straight on to the far end of Voyeurs’ Hall. There, in accordance with Almagro’s briefing, he discovered a latrine-Kasimir could hear one of the real flush toilets inside working as he approached.
Once inside the dimly lighted and evil-smelling facility, Kasimir fumbled and stalled, feigning intoxication, until other customers moved on and he felt reasonably sure of having a few moments free of observation. Then he hurried to a service door, really only a panel set into a wall, whose lock he had been told was broken.
Actually, as he discovered in a moment, the door or panel was held in place by no lock at all. Typically sloppy Red Temple building maintenance, he thought as he eased the light panel aside, worked his body cautiously through into the dark cavity beyond, and then maneuvered the loose panel as closely as possible back into place.
Now he was standing in a darkness greater than that of the dim latrine, and on an awkward and uneven footing. Kasimir decided to wait, before moving another centimeter, to give his eyes a chance to become adjusted to the gloom.
Soon he was able to discern that he was definitely in an unfinished portion of the building, where he stood surrounded by its darkened skeleton of timbers and stone piers, along with a lot of empty space. There was no real floor anywhere in sight. He was standing on a narrow beam, and even a small step in the wrong direction would earn him a nasty fall. A floor or two below him, the furnished and inhabited rooms were rendered visible in outline by little sparks of light that here and there leaked out through the joints between their walls and ceilings. Also from down there somewhere came loud, drumming music, and wisps of other and more human sounds emanating from the hundreds of occupants.
Looking up, the view was different. A solid roof at about the sixth-floor level blocked out the sky. There was almost no light at all above except for a few more stray gleams of that unearthly looking illumination that had first caught Kasimir’s eye when he was still outside the building.
And Robert de Borron-or someone-must indeed be at work up there, three levels above where Kasimir was hiding, for the sounds of the sculptor’s studio, an irregular pounding accompanied now and then by voices, came drifting down.
The next thing Kasimir had to do was to get up there.
Some meters distant horizontally from where he stood- it was hard to judge distances in this great darkened cavern where there were only tantalizing hints of light-the light from above was coming down more freely than elsewhere. Traces of the strange illumination shone out through the leaky sides of a large, roughly defined vertical column, that Kasimir presently realized must represent the shaft of the freight elevator used to haul de Borron’s heavy blocks of stone up to his studio. That elevator shaft, if he could get into it, certainly ought to offer a way up.
Having got his bearings as well as possible, Kasimir began to work his way in the direction of that vaguely glowing column, two or three meters square and extending its way up from ground level. The task, he discovered almost at once, was even more difficult than it looked. His only means of progress was to edge nervously along a narrow beam, his pathway interrupted at intervals by the thick columns of stone and timber holding up the upper floors. Once he had moved away from the paneled rear wall of the latrine, he had only space on right and left.
He had made only a few meters’ progress by this means when his way was blocked more substantially, this time by one of the projecting side corridors of the Hall of Voyeurs, complete with its set of performance rooms. The only way to get past this obstacle was to go over the top, and presently Kasimir found himself creeping across the broad upper surface of a thin ceiling. At one point the surface bent alarmingly beneath his weight; he sprawled out flat, as if he were on thin ice, and centimetered his way forward holding his breath.
>From inside the lighted room just beneath him there issued moans and rhythmic cries that suggested torture. Of course in a Red Temple other kinds of sensation were more probably the cause. Still, with every movement Kasimir made, the thin panels-and the plastering, if there was any-of the ceiling beneath him threatened to give way. He expected momentarily to go crashing and plunging down amid the bodies mounded on some bed. When that happened, the men with their eyes at peepholes in the lonely adjoining corridors would see a different show than they had expected.
Kasimir surmounted the barrier of the rooms at last. Now, feeling more and more like a beetle burrowing through the woodwork, he was back on his narrow beam again, working his way closer and closer to the silent, faintly glowing elevator shaft. No hoisting was in progress now, he was sure. If it had been, he would be able to hear men or load beasts straining at a windlass somewhere, and the creaking of the network of pulleys and cables he had once glimpsed from above. Anyway the sculptor’s work was supposed to be nearly done now, and it seemed likely that all his massive work pieces had already been hauled up.