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By Root 3040 0

a buzzing cloud of flies showed that her devotees were not backward in satisfying her thirst for blood, and it was a measure of his unease that he actually caught himself wondering if it were only goats that were being sacrificed to appease that thirst. He shook the thought from him with impatience, but was nevertheless inordinately relieved when at last they left the streets behind them, and dismounting in the entrance courtyard of the city palace, the ‘Rung Mahal’, were conducted through a maze of dusty rooms and dark stone passageways to meet the Rana. Though here too there was the same claustrophobic atmosphere that had been so noticeable in the streets: the same stillness and stifling heat, the same haunting sense of an unforgotten past… of old times and old evil, and the unquiet ghosts of dead kings and murdered queens.

Compared to the Palace of the Winds, the Rung Mahal – the ‘Painted Palaced’ – was a modest building comprising half-a-dozen courtyards, a garden or two, and not more than sixty or seventy rooms (no one had ever counted those in the Palace of the Winds, though the number was believed to be in the region of six hundred). Possibly it was for this reason – among others – that its owner had begun by treating his guests in a manner calculated to damp any pretensions they might have, and now followed it up by simultaneously dazzling them with magnificence and chilling their blood with as barbaric a display of military strength as Ash, for one, had ever seen–imagined.

It had been no surprise to find that the outer courtyards bristled with armed men, but the sight of the Rana's personal bodyguards, who policed the inner ones and lined the long dark corridors, had startled Ash considerably, not on account of their numbers, though there must have been several hundred of them, but because of their weird attire, and because here, once again, were masked faces.

The officers wore helmets of a pattern that the Saracens must have worn in the days of the Crusades. Antique iron casques with long flat nose pieces, damascened in gold and silver and deeply fringed with chain mail that protected the wearer's jaw and neck and partially concealed his cheeks, leaving only the eyes visible. The helmets of the rank and file, though similar in style, were fashioned of leather, and the effect in that half light was oddly inhuman, as though the macabre figures who lined the corridors were masked headsmen or the mummified bodies of dead warriors. Their surcoats too were of chain mail, and instead of swords they carried short spears. ‘Like lictors,’ thought Ash with a shiver.

He regretted that he had not brought his revolver with him, for the sight of these mailed figures brought home to him, as nothing else had done, that this was a place in which no rules – and no law as the West understood law – held sway. Bhithor was of another age and another world: she stood outside of present Time, and was a law unto herself.

In a final ante-chamber at least fifty servants, dressed in the Rana's colours of scarlet, sulphur-yellow and orange, divided to let the visitors through, and preceded by the royal relative with the senior officials bringing up the rear, they were ushered into the Diwan-i-Am, the ‘Hall of Public Audience’, where the Rana and his Prime Minister the Diwan, together with the councillors and courtiers, waited to receive them.

The Diwan-i-Am was a beautiful building, though at that season of the year unsuited for a morning audience, as it consisted of an open-sided pavilion formed by a triple row of columns, and was closed only at each end. With the sun blazing down upon it and no breath of breeze, the heat under the pillared arches was considerable, but its beauty made amends for any deficiencies in the way of comfort; and certainly the temperature did not appear to trouble the serried ranks of courtiers and noblemen who sat cross-legged on the uncarpeted floor, packed as closely as sardines in a tin, and dressed in their festive best.

At the far end of the hall a shallow flight of steps led up to a raised platform on