evidence of hellfire, Mriga found nothing but the same scattered plumes of smoke
and the smouldering reek that prevailed in the Sanctuary of the daylit world.
Yet the overhanging clouds were underlit as if with many fires.
As they walked further, Mriga got a chance to see why, and came to understand
that there was a difference here between the dead and the damned. Many of the
dark people going by carried their own hellfires with them- bright
conflagrations of rage, coal-red frustrations, banked and bitter, the hot light
sucking darknesses that were envy and greed, the blinding fire-shot smokes of
lust and hunger for power that fed and fed and were never consumed. Some few of
the passersby bore evidence of old burning, now long gone. They were burnt-out
cinders, merely existing, neither living nor dead. But worst of all, to Mriga’s
thought, were those many, many dead who had never even lived enough to burn a
little, who had given up both sin and passion as useless. They walked dully past
the flaming damned, and past goddesses, and neither hellfire nor the cold clean
light of Siveni’s spear found anything in their eyes at all.
She soon enough found worse. There were places that seemed damned as surely as
people; spots where murders or betrayals had taken place, and where they took
place again and again, endlessly, the original participants dragging the passing
dead in to re-enact the old horrors. Some shapes walking there were less dark
than others, but wore their torments differently-serpents growing from their