“Where are the others?”
“The timelocks are all barred, sir… except this one, of course. Please come with me to the Obscura Hall. You have guests.”
The galleries were deserted, every door jammed by a cross-beam, as Garstone had said. Eight men waited for them in the center of the Obscura Hall. Their leader was much older than Rachel remembered, but she recognized the scar running across his forehead. “Oran.”
“You owe me for what you did,” he snarled.
The other woodsmen leaned on their swords and axes and laughed. Rachel recognized most of them from her time in the Rusty Saw tavern, but she couldn't put names to their faces. They were large and bearded, still wearing the same lacquered wooden armour.
“How did you get back here?”
Sabor interrupted Oran's response. “These are not the men you knew, Miss Hael,” he said. “These people are from another reality.”
Oran snorted. “So said the king's arconites, but it all looks the same to me.” He leered at Rachel. “You cost me a king's ransom. I'd all but delivered that giant of yours into his hands until you did what you did. I've walked a long, long way to find you and earn back his favour. Now that I have you again, we'll see if Menoa wants to reinstate his offer.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Rachel said. She had refused to pay this bastard his gold, but that was all. How he could have delivered Dill to Menoa was beyond her.
“They said you wouldn't remember. You'll be coming with us up to the temple now. The king wants to meet you after all these years.”
Hasp growled. “Yes, we're going there, but not with you. Stand aside, woodsman, or I'll take that sword and sheathe it in your arse.”
Dill smiled faintly and strolled out from behind the god.
Oran shot an uneasy glance at Garstone.
“You won't harm anyone until we tell you to,” Sabor's assistant remarked. “You'll keep that mouth shut until we reach Ayen's temple.”
Hasp cried out in pain and clutched his head.
Sabor wheeled on his assistant. “You're the shape-shifter,” he said.
“No, sir,” Garstone replied. “I am just as human as always. But, like my brother here, I have sworn myself to the Mesmerist cause. The parasite recognizes the scent of Hell on us.”
Oran barked a laugh. “And it actually works,” he said. “Go on, Hasp. Kneel before your betters.” When the god did not respond, he yelled, “Bend the knee!”
The Lord of the First Citadel snarled, struggling to resist Menoa's parasite, but then he collapsed on his knees and let out a terrible wail.
Dill moved forward, but Rachel held up a hand to stop him. They exchanged a glance, during which she gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Wait until we reach, the temple.
Garstone warned his brother, “Be more specific, Oran. Hasp doesn't recognize you as his better. He would never have followed that first instruction.”
The woodsman grunted. “We'll try this, then,” he said. “Take the assassin's sword. Kill her if she resists.”
Hasp groped for Rachel.
“No!” Garstone cried. “Take the sword, but do not kill her. Do not kill anyone until the Lord of the Maze commands it.” He scratched his head. “But please do kill Sabor if he tries to fly away.” Then he nodded. “Yes, that about covers it.”
Rachel had felt disinclined to resist anyway. She let Hasp snatch away her sword.
Garstone breathed a sigh of relief. “Do not toy with him, Oran,” he said. “King Menoa specifically asked us to deliver them alive.”
“When did you turn against me?” Sabor asked.
“A long time from now, sir.”
“Just you? Or all of you?”
The little man smiled. “More of me every day, sir. I am busy recruiting even as we speak.”
“Then some are still loyal?”
“It's hard to believe I was once so naive, sir.”
Surrounded by woodsmen, the small party left the castle and set off up the mountain, under the soft luminance of the aurora in the skies. A steep trail zigzagged up the fractured black rock, and the worn steps suggested to Rachel that the temple had been here much longer than she had previously imagined. Had it always been a temple dedicated to Ayen? Had the door to her domain always remained open during that time?
She found the idea both terrifying and exhilarating, for the world of man had not yet been severed from the realm of Heaven. Would good souls be allowed to pass through that door? Curtains of light shimmered over the black peaks, hinting at a greater world beyond this one.
“It's the aftermath of the War Against Heaven,” Mina said. “Burning skies, rising seas… Sabor and his brothers have just been expelled from Ayen's realm. Their original selves are out there somewhere right now.”
“Shouldn't that Sabor be in his castle?”
“I was,” said the god of clocks. “And these turncoats weren't. None of this happened in my universe.”
“So the Mesmerists have changed them all?”
He nodded. “Countless futures stem from this moment in Time-and all of them are now bad, I fear. Our original timeline has now been overwhelmed by the morass of Menoa's bastard universes. When the Lord of the Maze kills himself, he'll go to Hell, but he'll leave his Mesmerists in control of my castle. They'll have access to all of Time, while this doomed continuum continues to exist.”
As the sun beat down upon them, Oran's men swore and complained. Sabor opened his wings as if to bathe his feathers in the warmth. Rachel's own reflection peered back at her from the black glass rock below her. She recalled similar geology in the dark abyss beneath Deepgate, so long ago: herself and Dill staring at themselves as though they were the only two people left in the world. Would that chained city ever come to exist now? Would Rachel herself ever be born? Or Carnival? Or Dill?
Dill's ghost walked up the mountain path beside her, dead three thousand years before his birth: an event that might now never happen. He caught her eye and smiled.
Below them spread the lands of Herica and Pandemeria, their green hills and plains interspersed with silver lakes, but no settlements, no roads, nothing to suggest that man had ever been here.
They crested a rise and came at last to the summit of the mountain. And here stood Ayen's temple.
It was a rather unimpressive grey stone cairn, barely larger than a worker's hovel. Twin columns of rough-hewn granite flanked a small, dark doorway. Piled-up stones formed the roof.
“This is it?” Mina said. “All the gods and their armies, the ancient technology… it's all spawned from this?”
“Why would Ayen choose to draw attention to the place?” Sabor explained. “A grander structure might have been seen from afar.”
Hasp glared at that dark portal with terror in his eyes. He clenched the sword in his fist so tightly that Rachel feared he would crush his own glass gauntlet. He seemed to try to speak through his clenched jaw, but then simply gave a low moan.
“Inside, please.” Garstone indicated the doorway.
They ducked inside a small, roughly conical chamber formed of dry stones. Another exit occupied the opposite wall, this one barred by an ill-fitting door made of loose planks, and rope cord binding the whole flimsy thing together. Daylight shone through the gaps in the boards.
Beside the door waited Alteus Menoa.
He was extraordinarily handsome, with amber eyes and silvery-grey hair hanging loose over his shoulders. A fine jaw tapered neatly underneath high cheekbones. He was barefoot but otherwise dressed, in a shirt and plain white linen breeches. He smiled with broad, soft lips.
Mina exchanged a glance with Rachel. Basilis curled around her foot and growled. Dill's body seemed to darken, but his eyes remained calm.