Amber and Blood - Margaret Weis [35]
After gulping in few deep, reassuring breaths, he decided to get up and take a look around.
He looked around and looked around again and the more he looked the more he was certain, with a quaking feeling in his gut, that this was somewhere he should not be and there was only thing for a kender of common sense—even a kender with horns—to do.
“Rhys,” Nightshade wailed, “help!”
Rhys turned just in time to see Nightshade sucked inside the Hall of Sacrilege and the door slam shut on him. Mina was laughing and clapping her hands. “Now, Mister Monk, you’ll have to go inside. I win.”
She grinned and stuck out her tongue at him.
Rhys had never been a parent himself, and he had often wondered how any adult could bear to spank a child. He was now beginning to understand.
Mina swam to the door, and brushed her hand across the rune-carved emerald. As the door swung slowly open, sea water carried Mina and Rhys inside and bowled over Nightshade, who had been beating on the door with his fists.
Rhys picked himself up. He looked back through the open door onto the desert-like landscape of rippling wet sand.
Atta stood outside the door in the wet sand, shaking off the water, starting with her hind end and working her way to the front. When Rhys called to her, she slunk warily through the door. She clearly did not want to be here. Pressing her body up against his, she stood there, shivering.
Nightshade didn’t want to be here either.
“Rhys,” he said in a shaking voice, “this is it. This is that Hall place. It’s … it’s pretty scary, Rhys. I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”
The Solio Febalas, the Hall of Sacrilege—the repository of the Kingpriest’s arrogant determination to defy the gods. Nightshade’s instincts (and Atta’s) were right. Mortals were not meant to be here. The hall was sacred to the gods, to their wrath.
“You’re not mad at me for making you come inside, are you, Mister Monk?” Mina asked wistfully, and she slid her hand into his.
Looking at her, he did not see a god. He saw a child with the mind of a child—unformed, with imperfect knowledge of the world, and he wondered, suddenly, if that was what the gods saw when they looked upon mankind.
Rhys no longer felt the gods’ wrath. He felt their sorrow.
“No, Mina,” he said, “I am not mad at you.”
The Hall was immense, perfectly round in shape, with a high, domed ceiling. The walls were notched with alcoves carved into the stone, each sacred to one of the gods. A single rune adorned the wall of each alcove. In some instances, the runes shone with light. There was the steadily beaming light of Majere, the blue-white flame of Mishakal, the almost blinding silver glare of Kiri-Jolith.
Alcoves on the opposite side of the hall were dark, fighting to extinguish the light. The dread symbol of Sargonnas, God of Vengeance, was darkness on darkness. The alcove of Morgion was a noxious black green, Chemosh was ghastly bone white.
The alcoves in between, separating darkness and light, striving to hold each in check, belonged to the neutral gods. In the center was the alcove sacred to Gilean. A book lay open upon the altar. Red light shone upon a set of scales, perfectly balanced, that stood in the center.
On either side of the altar of Gilean, one on the left and one on the right, were two alcoves that were neither dark nor light, but were both shrouded in shadow, as though a veil hung over them. Once, one had been impenetrably dark, the other unbearably light. Both were empty now—the altars of the banished Takhisis and the self-exiled Paladine.
The Hall was filled with holy artifacts, stacked on top of the altars, or jumbled