The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [141]
“What’s going on, Landus?” Falken said.
The young acolyte struggled for words. He must have run from the Fourth Circle all the way here. “It’s … it’s Orsith.”
Melia lifted a hand to her throat, the blood draining from her face. “Landus, what is it? Tell me at once that Orsith is well.”
“I’m … I’m sorry, Your Holiness.”
Melia slumped back into her chair, limply, like a piece of cloth cast down.
“I felt a chill come over me a short while ago,” she said softly. “I thought it only the night air. But it wasn’t the air, was it?”
She looked up at Landus, and the young acolyte’s face was a mask of sorrow.
“No, Your Holiness, it was not.”
47.
The countless temples of the Second Circle glowed in the pearly light of the moon. To Aryn, they looked like houses of bones shining in the night.
The streets of Tarras were not so busy as during the warm hours of the day, but even in the coolness of midnight they were far from empty. Torches lit the way for drunken revelers to stagger from one feast to another. Music and laughter drifted out of glowing windows, although somehow the sound was more sinister than merry. From time to time cries echoed through the city, but whether they were made in pain or ecstasy was impossible to tell.
Just before they left the Fourth Circle, a man in fine clothes had stumbled before Aryn. He vomited onto the street, laughed, then staggered on. Durge started to move after the man, to rebuke him, but Aryn tugged his arm. Melia had not stopped moving.
The Third Circle had been quiet, for it lay under the watchful eyes of the Tarrasian military. The temple district through which they passed was neither silent nor as raucous as the lower circles of the city. Still, it was clear that many gods favored the shadows of night to the bright sun of day. Incense rose on the air, along with the murmur of chanted prayers.
They passed one temple whose doors stood wide open. Light spilled down the steps like molten gold. Above the door, a frieze depicted a leering, goat-legged god. In one hand he held a naked maiden, in the other a pretty young man.
Aryn’s gaze drifted past the doors. The temple was filled with the smoke of braziers, so that it was hard to be certain what it was she was seeing. But the floor of the temple seemed to writhe as if alive with serpents. Then a night breeze spun the smoke in circles, and she saw not serpents, but arms and legs, tangled together into a living, undulating knot. Moans rose on the air like fractured prayers. They were sounds of pleasure. Or torture.
This time it was Durge who pulled her arm. “No, my lady. Do not look within that temple.”
Through great force of will, she managed to wrest her gaze away and let the knight pull her after the others.
Landus led them quickly through the shadowy streets. The young acolyte’s face was solemn, and perhaps it was a trick of the moonlight, but even his large, crooked nose seemed far less comical than Aryn remembered. It seemed once again she had underestimated someone.
By the time they reached the temple of Mandu, the mourning had already begun. The stark interior of the temple was lit by a pale, sourceless radiance, so that the white stone seemed almost translucent. A dozen priests and priestesses stood before the temple’s altar, beneath the serene, smiling statue of the Everdying God. Something rested on the stone slab.
Except that wasn’t quite right. Whatever the object was, it hovered above the stone surface. At last Aryn realized that it was the form of a man, wrapped head to toe in a shroud of white. Only his face remained uncovered: gaunt and wrinkled, yet in death as peaceful as that of his god.
“Oh, Orsith,” Melia whispered.
The priests and priestesses parted as she rushed to the altar, as if they had been expecting this. Melia caressed the old man’s face. She bent to whisper to him, but whatever she said was lost as a song rose on the air. Aryn could not understand the strange words the priests and priestesses sang, but there was sorrow in it, and a vast, endless joy that was almost too much to bear.