Gaultry and Tullier slipped into the Goddess-Twins’ temple through
the small wicket door cut into one of the large, handsomely carved doors that fronted the temple’s enormous central chamber. The scent of strong incense lingered, and the dark, warm space, with its hovering dome, greeted them with quiet serenity. Four oil lamps, suspended over the stone altar at the room’s center, gave the room its only source of illumination. Their shuttered light cast a circle on the floor around the altar.
Gaultry handed their lantern to Tullier for safekeeping and strode for the altar. She had expected to find the temple guarded by some sleepy acolyte or priest, and was grateful for the unanticipated privacy.
The altar was an ancient chunk of stone, the Great Twins’ double-spiral chiseled repeatedly onto its sides and top. Though she had visited the temple on several occasions since taking residence in Princeport, back before her travels in Bissanty, this was the first time she had the opportunity to view the altar alone, and closely. She tentatively traced a carved spiral’s course. Hers were far from the first hands to have caressed the stone this way. The carvings were patinaed dark with the touch of many hands, polished smooth in testament to the many prayers spoken there.
In Arleon Forest she prayed comfortably enough beneath a canopy of leaves, but here, within palace precincts, it felt seemly and right to worship Tielmark’s gods in their own house.
Breathing deeply the temple’s heady incensed air, she moved her
hands across the ugly grey stone’s weather-beaten surface, searching to ground herself in its stolid form. The wear patterns told a story: The stone had stood outside under the open sky for centuries before being dragged in under this roof. Atop the stone, the modern altar-brazier was a practical pan and grating of hammered iron, large enough to receive branches of substantial size, aglow this night with carefully banked coals. She stared down at those coals, relishing the feeling of security that washed over her. Her nervousness, her horror at the trap of dreams—all of this slipped away.
Tullier, standing beyond the circle of light, could not conceal his impatience as she lingered. “Are you going to offer a prayer or not? If you want to get back for Tamsanne, we shouldn’t delay.”
She gave him a sharp look, not wanting to be rushed, then reminded herself that he had the right of it, and roused to look for appropriate prayer implements. The offering box next to the altar was tidily stacked with dry branches: ash for Emiera, oak for Elianté. Gaultry selected a pair of well-dried boughs and broke them up into the brazier.
“Great Lady Emiera,” she prayed, stirring the embers. “Elianté, Valiant Huntress. For preserving me, I send to you my gratitude, my faith—” Leaping upward, the fire caught on a cluster of dried leaves, then started on its wood.
“I thank you,” Gaultry intoned. “For my life and health this night, I thank you.” The light of the fire grew momentarily so intense, she had to look away. She fixed on the brazier that contained the fire instead, seeing at first the dull reflection on its scoured surface, and then, past that, something elusive; something that faded the instant she tried to focus on it.
The brazier was a sturdy piece of metal, but worn. The edges were scoured and dented from constant use. An unexpected resonance rose: This was the second time in as many days that her attention had fixed on an altar-brazier. The first had been at the Duchess’s last ceremony, down in the funerary chapel.
Branches for the gods this time, the last, white lilies for the dead. A fresh wave of sorrow swept her, and with it anger too. Neither Dervla nor Palamar had evidenced signs of mourning while conducting the final ritual of Melaudiere’s funeral. Behavior appropriate to their ceremonial roles, of course, but Dervla at least had known the old Duchess well—had even depended on her support in the terrible months when the
traitor-chancellor had held the Prince bound by treacherous magic. Gaultry could not believe it would have done the ceremony harm if Dervla had conducted it with a tincture of personal feeling.
Within the brazier, the oak branch caught flame. She shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to focus a prayer of gratitude. Compulsion had driven her here to give the Great Twins thanks, not to mourn for the manners of the High Priestess.
Yet something here nagged—something that would not let the meditative warmth of prayer rise and take her.
She found herself staring at the brazier again.
Something
about it had her attention, stronger even than the impulse to prayer. What? The pan was both larger and plainer than that of the altar down in the funerary chapel. Instead of hammered flower shapes and elaborate piercing, it matched the coarseness of the altar-stone.
The hammered flower shapes.
Through her tunic she clutched for Haute-Tielmark’s ring, hidden so long on its leather string on her neck. As she touched its shape beneath the cloth, a picture of the brazier in the funerary chapel rose clearly before her, a picture of the hammered flowers that adorned the brazier’s rim.
They matched those of the ring.
“Elianté-bold, Emiera-fair, I worship you.” She pulled the ring free of her clothes and held it out to the sacrifice branches, reduced now to brittle dying ash. “I worship you for leading me. For answering the questions I did not know to ask.” She quickly stirred and banked the embers.
“Tullier.” She found his face in the shadows beyond the circle. “There’s something we must look into before we rendezvous with Tamsanne. Gods in me, it can’t wait until morning.”
Seeing her expression, he did not argue. “I’m with you,” was all he said.
The bronze-clad door that guarded the steps down to the funerary chapel was closed and locked. She set Tullier to open it. The lock was a simple, crude affair, intended only to discourage casual entry. He jimmied it open in less time than it had taken for her offering to burn. A cool draft rose from the well of pitch black that filled the descending steps.
“Lock it,” Gaultry told him, as they stepped inside. Their small light did not penetrate very far down the steps. “I don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, or how important it will prove. I’d rather no one interrupt us until we have a better idea of what we’re after.”
Tullier nodded, and fumbled the lock shut.
The chapel, though darkened, was as she remembered it. The heavy low trusses, the patchwork of memorial tablets honoring the dead. Shadows concealed the carved grey cross of the Melaudiere panel, deep in its recess between two trusses. By now it would have been mortared in place, sealed until another Duke of Melaudiere was brought here. A melancholy thought.
Gaultry crossed the navy darkness to the room’s single slitted window. Beyond, the only things visible were the flat sheet of the night sea and a sliver of the rugged cliff wall that faced the palace’s northern prospect. In constructing the chapel and the temple, the builders had pressed the limits of their craft, sitting it precariously on the sheer edge. Their architectural feat meant light from this window could not be seen from the shore.
“You can open the light,” she told Tullier. “It won’t be seen, save for by those far to sea.”
After the Duchess’s funeral, the altar-brazier had been swept clean and scrubbed. A musty burned smell remained, but every trace of ash had been cleared. Gaultry paused to fumble for the ring.
“Where did you get that?” Tullier asked, as she drew it forth.
“The big duke who hired us that fishwagon. The first morning after the attack at Sizor’s Bridge.” At the accusing look in his eyes, she shrugged. “You were in no fit state to be told of it that morning, and afterwards, there was never a chance. He told me that he thought it was a sort of key—though he didn’t know what it was intended to open.”
Memory—or the gods—had served her well. The flowers of Haute-Tielmark’s ring matched the brazier’s design, and the gap where it fit into the brazier’s rim was immediately obvious. A pin, designed to look like a tendril of plant, stuck up in the center of the gap, corresponding to the insertion hole in the hammered flower on the ring. “Look at this.” She handed Tullier the ring and gestured to the brazier’s rim. “These two are meant to join as one, don’t you think?”
Tullier turned it over in his hand, studying first the pinhole in the hammered flower and then the hinged prong that was built into the ring’s band. After a moment he held it up against the edge of the brazier, examining how the brazier pin would fit into the flower. “If you wear the ring when you push it onto the pin on the brazier,” he said finally, “the prong will be forced inwards and cut your finger.”
“That’s right.” Gaultry shivered. “The altar wants a taste of blood before it will reveal its secrets.”
His eyes met hers across the altar, concerned. “If this were Bissanty, both your ring and the altar would be poisoned. Only those born to sufficient immunity to survive the poison would be able to make use of the key.”
“Charming,” Gaultry said, taking back the ring and putting it on her finger. Bissanty’s rigid caste-sorting by personal poison immunity was one of the Empire’s least attractive features. “Fortunately for me, this is not Bissanty.”
Despite her bluster, her hand quivered as she positioned it on the brazier’s edge. She wished Tullier had kept his mouth shut.
“Let me do it,” Tullier urged, seeing her hesitation. “If it’s poisoned, it won’t hurt me.”
She almost nodded. Tullier’s Blood-Imperial, combined with the poisoning regimen of his Sha Muira training, had rendered him immune to all but the most God-potent toxins. But to show herself so craven, here in the temple of her own prince … “This altar is dedicated to my gods,” Gaultry said, disliking that something so simple could be so quickly turned into an unreasonable risk. “To Tielmark, not to Bissanty. Whatever force is here, whatever magic, it will not be played by Bissanty rules. And Tielmarans are not poisoners.”
He started to argue, but her expression shut him up.
This is faith
—she told the Goddess-Twins, inserting the head of the pin into the ring’s reception hole—
I hope you see fit to reward it
.
She pressed her hand downward. Flower met silver flower, completing the rim design. Forced by the insertion of the pin, the ring’s prong snapped inward as she pressed down, biting her finger with a wasp-sharp sting. Startled by the unexpected intensity of the pain, she jerked away. A single drop of blood dropped and fell, quivering on the polished metal.
Nothing.
“Is that all?” Tullier said.
They’d both expected something more dramatic.
“Unless you have a constructive suggestion as to what I should do next, yes, that’s all.” Disappointment filled her. “Haute-Tielmark was so sure this ring was important. He risked his honor to keep it out of Dervla’s hands. Well, we are here, and now we know what the ring is for. Why hasn’t it done anything?”
“Try it again,” Tullier offered. “Maybe something happened and we weren’t watching closely enough to see.”
Gaultry wrung her punctured hand. “You weren’t so keen for me to
do it the first time round. What happened to your misgivings?” The little wound stung. She was not eager for a repeat.
“You didn’t keep your hand down on the rim very long. Maybe it needs more blood.”
“Fine,” she snapped. Of course that was what he would think. His damn training again. “I’ll do it, then—” She stepped forward to brace one hand against the altar-stone, intending to get it over with quickly.
But the substance of the stone was not there. Her hands, instead of bracing her, slipped through the visible surface. She took an involuntary step forward in her effort to regain her balance and neither the substance of the ground nor the altar plinth was there to stop her from falling. Tullier grabbed for her. Together they did an awkward pirouette, lurching back from the concealed line of the brink. The lantern fell from Tullier’s hand, hit the floor, and winked out.
“Gods!” Gaultry swore, at last finding her balance. “Stand still and let your eyes adjust. Who knows what else has gone to vapor?”
The slash of weak light from the window fell far short of the room’s center, but it was enough to help them reorient. Tullier rummaged for his tinderbox. “I’ll run upstairs for a light,” he offered. “That may be faster than finding a patch—”
“Wait,” said Gaultry. “I see something.”
Her eyes at last had adjusted to the darkness, revealing a faint green image near the center of the room, just under where the altar stood. Had stood. As she stared, it became more focused. What she’d taken at first for the flat image of a shell, a creature of nautilus-like chambers, was in fact the faint outline of a descending spiral of stairs, positioned beneath the footprint of the altar-stone’s base. She stepped cautiously forward. Her groping hands could not find the altar’s edge. The dark had rendered it invisible as well as substanceless. “There’s something underneath the altar!” Her voice skipped in her excitement. “Stairs. A hidden passage.”
“Let me get a light going, and we’ll explore.”
Gaultry shook her head, then realized that he wouldn’t be able to see the gesture. “It’s goddess-light,” she explained impatiently. “Can’t you see it?” The eldritch color was the green of the Great Twins’ power in its purest form. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to see it myself if you make a light.” She reached for his hand in the darkness. “Come stand by me. Can’t you make it out?”