“I have no patience in this matter,” she said to the guild scion. “Karsrick is benefiting from all the work I undertook before the disaster; if the Bolg restore Entudenin, he will have the water that should have belonged to me. Why has no one gotten inside? The guards have always been easy to bribe or threaten.”
“The Yarimese guards, yes, mistress,” Dranth replied darkly. “But the Bolg are standing guard as well; their king brought his own security detail with him, and they are steadfast and thus far unapproachable.”
The guildmistress’s black eyes glistened angrily.
“I want to know what is going on in that tent,” she said in a low, deadly voice. “And I need to have someone get inside, to prevent the theft of my water. Before night falls tomorrow, it will be done, or blood will spill like the water from Entudenin.”
12
Within three days, Ashe’s prediction had come to pass. The Bolg followed a regular schedule of workshifts, laboring silently in the heat beneath the tents that surrounded the work site, and the villagers of Yarim Paar settled for watching them enter and leave the tents and the city as their rotations changed, from the boundary two street lengths away.
The throngs that had gathered during the first days began to grow sparse, and while there was still considerable interest in the primitive men whom the Lady Cymrian had said were Entudenin’s hope for resurrection, the majority of the town returned to its work and its daily routine, occasionally happening by the square at the appointed hours to see the Bolg hurry out of the tents to their waiting escorts. No interaction was allowed, and since the Bolg never initiated any, or showed any interest in meeting or touching any of the citizens of Yarim Paar, it became unconsciously clear to the townspeople that the Firbolg were being protected from them, and not the other way around, which changed the mood from resentful and fearful curiosity to that of embarrassed interest.
The linen tents, bleached white as snow at the onset of the project, rapidly took on a brownish-red cast from the clay dust spattered into the air by the drilling. Great beams of wood were brought in on the Bolg’s supply wagons, lashed together in articulated sections that were driven into the ground by massive apparatuses of tampers and gears, sophisticated machines designed centuries before by Gwylliam and used to hollow out the passageways of Can -rif. The townspeople of Yarim Paar, accustomed only to the well-digging practices of the Shanouin, marveled at the sights and sounds of the tools that the Bolg were making use of, though most of the smaller equipment was kept from their sight, like the craftsmen themselves.
The disembodied arm of Entudenin was removed first, and, in a quiet ceremony, brought into the Judiciary’s main rotunda beneath the palace’s famous minarets. There it was put on display, because Yarim had no elemental temple, its people worshipping under the auspices of the Blesser of Canderre-Yarim, Ian Steward, who held services in the Basilica of Fire in Bethany a hundred leagues away. The first day it was available to be viewed by the public, more than four thousand people came to reverently observe it, ten times the number that had paid their respects when the body of Ihrman Karsrick’s father had been lying in state in the same rotunda many years before.
Ashe watched the crowds filing into the rotunda from the balcony of their tower guest chambers west of the central palace, chuckling at the look on Rhapsody’s face.
“What is it now, my love?” he asked teasingly. “You seem amazed.”
“I am amazed,” Rhapsody said, staring over the railing at the snaking line that stretched down the streets, almost to the central Marketway. “That bloody thing stood in the center of their town for hundreds of years, ignored and unnoticed. Virtually every merchant, every tradesman who had business in the center of the city, walked by it every day, and no one paid it a bit of attention except a few pilgrims and a little boy I once saw stop there to relieve himself. And now it is a holy relic of vast interest to the same people who were oblivious to it three days ago. It is amazing.”
Ashe put his arms around her. “Indeed. Well, do you suppose I might be able to draw your interest away from this amazing sight for a while?”
“By all means,” she said, smiling. “What do you have in mind?”
“I thought we might go out into the city in disguise—you could put on a ghodin and I can wear a hooded veil like the Shanouin well-diggers or some other pilgrim.”
His wife laughed in delight. “Back to the days of hiding your face, are we? Well, I did wear a ghodin the last time I was here with Achmed, so that I would not be recognized. There are not too many yellow heads in Yarim; I would have been a curiosity, and since we were here to snatch the slave boys from the tile foundry, that would not have been a good thing. I can wear one again; all that flowing white linen keeps the heat out. So where would we go? It might be a good time to shop the market; all the townspeople are in the Judiciary, bowing to a dead rock formation. The crowds shouldn’t be too pressing.”
“Not quite what I had in mind.”
“Oh?”
“I thought we might make a visit to Manwyn’s temple.”
The laughter in Rhapsody’s eyes resolved to a clear, sober expression.
“Are you certain you want to do that, Sam?” she asked gently.
“Yes,” he answered, taking her hand and leading her back into the tower chambers. “Let us obtain the answers to our questions, knowing we may only get some insane babble, and then we can make an afternoon of it. We can take noonmeal in a tavern or over one of those open-street firepits, and then find something quaint in the market to bring home for Gwydion and Melly.”
Rhapsody made a deep reverence before her husband. “Lead on, m’lord.”
Manwyn’s temple stood at the western edge of the city, the centerpiece of a section that had been a thriving water garden in the time when Entudenin still brought forth her liquid gifts, now all but deserted. Deep, dry depressions that had once been immense pools lined the decaying streets, along which broken statuary of sea nymphs poured empty vessels into dusty fountains.
The temple itself was, like Yarim Paar itself, large, majestically built, but decaying from neglect. Formed of marble which must have been magnificent in its time, the Temple of the Oracle was composed of a central building with two annex wings sprawling at the end of the main thoroughfare, crumbling in places. Cracked marble steps led up to a wide, inlaid patio, where eight huge columns stood on the unevenly paved surface, marred by expanding patches of lichen.
The central building was a large rotunda topped with a circular dome in which two large cracks could be seen. A tall, thin minaret crowned this central building, shining like a beacon in the sun.
Rhapsody stopped at the base of the grand staircase.
“Are you certain you want to do this?” she asked Ashe again. “It was very strange the last time the two of you saw each other here; I don’t want to repeat that, if possible.”
“You do not enjoy being in the center of a battle of dragon will in a moth-eaten temple?” Ashe replied, looking into her green eyes, the only part of her visible beneath the ghodin. “Teetering on the brink of her yawning well as the ground shakes, dodging falling pieces of the firmament of the dome?”
“That would be accurate, yes.”
“I will do my best to behave,” he promised. “Come, Aria.”
Rhapsody’s green eyes glittered nervously. “Do you remember the wording we planned?”
Ashe caressed her hand reassuringly. “Yes. Come.”
They climbed the great stair and passed through the large open portal that served as the entrance. The inside of the temple was dark, lit only by dim torches and candles, keeping the entranceway in a perennial state of half-light.
The interior of the temple, unlike its edifice, was well maintained. In the center of the vast room a large fountain blasted a thin stream of water twenty feet into the air, where it splashed down into a pool lined with shimmering lapis lazuli. The floor was polished marble, the walls adorned with intricately decorated tile, the sconces shining brass.