PROLOGUE (69 page)

Fretfully, he fingered a parchment sheet that lay at the corner of the table, running a hand up the neat lines of its text and then down again, up and then down.” You were all that mattered. From the first day I met you it was as if I had been blinded, a veil cast over my sight. I could see nothing but you." He fell silent, and at last went on.” I know your secret, I know what you are, but I will never betray you."

"What am I?"

He looked up at last, meeting her gaze, and his stare was so intense and so. scalding that she wished he hadn't. Better not to see him, scarred and flawed as he was but still as beautiful as the dawn; standing this nakedly before her, his desire for her was plain to see.

"Fire," he said hoarsely.” Ai, God, Liath, go. Go. I desire you too much. I can't trust myself with you so close. I've tried to make a decent life here as a presbyter, doing what I can to serve God, and it will be enough."

"I'll go," she said, stumbling over the words as the chains wrapped their silken cord around her again, wanting to say,
"I'll stay."
"But you said that you have Da's book."

"The book." He lifted a hand to conceal his face. He stood so still for a moment, his emotions hidden from her, that she actually had an instant of disorientation, as though the world was spinning wildly beneath her feet and she was about to fall, or was already falling endlessly and forever down through the spheres until she would be lost in the pit and never free.

"The book." He lowered his hand to rustle the parchment. The

movement drew her gaze down to the figures neatly inscribed there.

"What is that?" she asked, enticed by the orderly lines and repetitive figures. Fetters drew tighter, binding her again as she moved to stand beside him so that she didn't block the light.” That's a date."

"A date? I've been puzzling this out. I don't know what it means, but there's clearly a pattern. Do you know?"

"Yes, yes," she said with mounting excitement.” Da and I saw a clay tablet with writing like this in the ruins of Kartiako. There was a very old man there, a sage who claimed to have knowledge of the most ancient days of his tribe. Of course I can't read this writing, all sticks and angles, but he said it was a table charting the course of Somorhas. When it appears in the evening sky and when in the morning."

"And the intervals of disappearance?"

"Yes, exactly! But this is a whole page! The other was only fragments. Is there more?"

"This is the only page I have seen. I believe it was copied from a more ancient source, perhaps from one of these clay tablets you mention. Do you see, here," he pointed to a smudge, "how the scribe made a mistake and then corrected it. How does it work?" "The ancient Babaharshans observed the stars for a thousand years. They recognized that Somorhas is both the evening star and the morning star, and that when she falls into the shadow of the sun that she vanishes for an interval, sometimes about eight days and sometimes about fifty days."

He nodded, caught up in her excitement.” But Somorhas is part of God's creation. Fate guides her movements. Isn't it every eight years that she comes again to the place she was before, relative to the position of the sun?"

"Yes, of course. Look, here. That set of markings is a date, according to the sage at Kartiako. He called it—

A moment only it took her to shift her attention into her city of memory. She skipped past the seven gates, the Rose of Healing, the Sword of Strength, the Cup of Boundless Waters, the Ring of Fire, the Throne of Virtue, the Scepter of Wisdom, passing beneath the Crown of Stars itself to the topmost part of the city where lay the astronomer's hall, a circular building ringed with smaller, curving walls. Here in these galleries she had set her memory pictures of the cycles of the wandering stars and the precession of the equinoxes. Here, in an alcove marked with a drifting sand dune and lit by a bright sapphire no brighter than Hugh's eyes to signify the sage's complete love of wisdom, she found what she was looking for.

"He called it the month of 'Ishan.' These lines signify numbers, so that would be eleven. I don't know how to read the rest, but this says that on the eleventh day of the month of Ishan, Somorhas would well, that's the puzzle, isn't it? Her first appearance as morning star for that cycle, perhaps, or her disappearance into the sun's glare." She faltered, remembering how quickly others got bored when she got caught up in cycles and epicycles, conjunctions and precession, the endlessly intriguing wonder of the universe.

"Do you know," he said slowly, absently tracing the pattern of the markings, "there has been debate here among the college of astronomers about Ptolomaia's use of the equant point. Of course many claim that if planets move with varying speeds, then the heavens do not move in a uniform motion, as we know they must. But without the equant point, then truly we cannot account for all the movements of the planets in the heavens."

"Unless Ptolomaia is wrong, and the Earth isn't stationary."

Stunned, he stared at her while the lamp flame hissed and a breeze off the parapet rustled through the papers scattered over the table.

She went on, made rash by the dreamlike quality of their meeting, by his surprise, by a fierce recklessness overtaking her, here where she could speak freely the forbidden words known to the mathematici.” What if the heavens are at rest and it is Earth which revolves from west to east?"

He leaned down, both hands on the table, shutting his eyes as he considered.” West to east," he murmured.” That would create the same effect. Or if both the heavens and the Earth moved, one from east to west and the other from west to east " He trailed off, too caught up in the puzzle to finish, gripped by the same passion for knowledge that had always held her in thrall.

Had she misjudged him? Had his humiliation at Anne's hands caused him to look into his heart, deep waters indeed, and transform what he found there? How could she have felt that silken touch winding through her body as a chain and fetter, when it was what had brought her here in time to see, and to aid, the change that would make Hugh over into a new person, her heart's desire?

A door thumped gently against the wall as the breeze caught it. The lamp flame flared up boldly, illuminating him. Wind kissed her face. He was so inadvertently close to her, eyes closed, expression almost innocent, if the desire for knowledge can ever be innocent. He smelled faintly of the scent of vineflower and cypress. This close, she felt the heat of his body, no less potent than the yearning in her heart. Was that her heart pounding? Was this what she had been looking for all along? Someone with the same passion, the same questioning, unquiet mind?

Was it her hand lifting to touch his chest, where his heart beat most strongly? Was it she who leaned closer, into him, and brushed his cheek with her lips?

He opened his lips in a soundless sigh. Turning to her, seeking, he kissed her even as she kissed him. In a moment they stood together, so close that like the aetherical daimones who mingle sometimes in ecstasy they seemed to melt one into the other, as if their bodies could actually interpenetrate and become one in truth, a union so complete that no earthly intimacy could rival the depth of their sharing.

"Ai, Liath." He murmured her name as a caress as the lamp blazed behind him, making him shine.

A small voice shunted away into the deepest, dustiest corner of her mind, almost too faint to hear, spoke in her heart.

I'm going to wake up and find myself in Hugh's bed.

At that instant, choking, she felt the writhing worm, an actual presence inside her. The silk ribbon, but a living one, that had insinuated itself into her body and now sank its aetherical touch deep into her flesh, mingling and melting until her arm raised of its own accord, not hers, to caress Hugh, until her body pressed itself against him, seeking his touch, until she would give herself to him of her own free will—

But it was not her.

Lies and deceit. In the sphere of Somorhas dwelt dreams and delusion.

"No, Liath," he said, as if he'd heard her thoughts, as if she'd cried out loud.” This is the truth of your heart's desire. I am with you. I am not a dream. Hate me if you must, but see that we are alike, you and I."

Wasn't it true, after all? No matter what he was now or what had gone before? Didn't she recognize in him a soul like her own, passionate and eager? Ai, Lady, had she always hated him and loved him in equal measure?

Nay, that was the worm speaking.

The daimone was now so thoroughly intermixed with her own being that it was becoming impossible to separate out her own thoughts from those it spoke within her mind, from those it uttered with her voice, "I am not like you, Hugh," she said, each word a struggle as the daimone tried to form other words on her lips: "
'
/
stay with you, I'll love you and only you."

"If you turn away from me now, Liath, then what choice will I have but to go back to being what I was before? You are fire. You can cleanse me. Your love can purify me. Stay with me, Liath."

Fire.

She reached for that single lamp flame, flickering as the wind rose. His arms tightened around her.

She called fire.

The room exploded in flames.

Hugh was gone, torn away. She stood on a featureless plain, rose-colored mist twining around her body, the fog of lies and deceit that had ensnared her. In that mist, even into and interpenetrating her own flesh, she saw the pale glamour of a daimone actually
inside
her, part of her body.

Fire raged at the horizon, a wall of flames that marked the gate of the Sun.

It faded as the tower chamber swam back into view, as the daimone infesting her pulled her back into the dream, into the lie.

One step she took, toward the Sun, then a second agonizing step as Hugh winced in pain and she wanted to reach to him, to smooth anguish from his brow, to show him that he truly was her heart's desire. No one else. No one else fit for her.

A third step, like walking on broken glass, and she had crossed the plain. The inferno that was the sphere of the Sun began actually to burn the clothes off her body.

Scour herself clean. She wasn't afraid of fire. She never had been. The fire cut deeper, melting away her flesh, but that was not really her flesh but rather the daimone, writhing as the sun's fire forced it to twist out of her body. It fled down along a gleaming thread, back to Earth.

"Damn." Hugh's voice was almost lost in the crack of flame as the wall of fire rose in a sheet of brilliance in front of her.

Had it all been a lie? Or had she seen truths within herself, far down in those depths, that she could not bear to acknowledge? Wasn't it true, after all, that beneath the surface they shared a similar passion? That she had more in common with Hugh than she had ever had with Sanglant?

The truth was too horrible to contemplate. Naked, she flung herself into the blazing furnace of the Sun.

NO doubt the old Dariyan Empire had fallen in large part because of the corruption that had ripened within the imperial house and burst at last in a final flowering of putrescence. Ancient images and obscene pagan carvings still fouled old corners and forgotten rooms in the skopos' palace. Not all had been chipped away and replaced by saintly figures more appropriate to a land presided over by the Daisanite church.

Corruption still insinuated its tentacles into the heart of earthly empire, whether spiritual or secular. That much was achingly apparent to Antonia as she sat at the Feast of St. Johanna the Messenger and watched King John, known as Ironhead, publicly molest the daughter of the Lady of Novomo, she who had harbored the fugitive Queen Adelheid last spring. The girl was barely into pubescence, in the first flush of development. Ironhead drank heavily and acted every bit the coarse bastard he in truth was, even fondling the girl's small breasts through her gown. That she wept silently, tears coursing down her face at this humiliation, open for all to see, did not stop him. But Hugh did.

He called over a steward and whispered instructions into the man's ear. Soon enough, a trio of the king's whores—Ironhead had installed a dozen or more in his chambers—emerged to the sound of lute and drum. They were pretty young things, skilled in the art of lascivious dancing, something not meant to be viewed in such a public arena. Their antics would have made Antonia blush if she were not made of sterner stuff. She understood the attractions of the flesh though she had long ago strangled any such carnal desire in herself. It only got in the way.

Presbyter Hugh was no fool. He understood the weak stuff that Ironhead was made of. Once the king's attention had been caught by the obscene undulations of the dancing girls, Hugh sent the king's hostage away and substituted another of the king's whores in her place. Ensnared in the grasp of wine and lust, Ironhead either did not notice or in any case soon ceased to care.