But he did not respond at once with the story of his own bereavement, as I had expected. He fell silent, as though some dam within him was holding him back. I waited, urging him with my eyes to confide in me, and before long I could see the dam beginning to break.
Quickly, then, his tale came pouring out of him. A young and beautiful wife, apple of his eye, his treasure, his only joy, a paragon among women, a wife far beyond his true deserts, the envy of all his friends—struck down in the second year of their marriage, carried off in a trice by the sting of some venomous tropical insect. Inconsolable, half dead with sorrow, he had gone from one creed’s chapel to another, he said, seeking the one that might have the power to restore her to him; but of course there was none that did. Someone had told him of the Temple of Eternal Comfort, and he had made his last attempt there. He had spoken most earnestly with the two founders, and with the high priest Endrago, begging them to work the miracle for him. Each of them had said it could not be done: in our world death is final and there is no coming back from it. Yet he had persisted. He was a man of some means; one day he came to Melifont and Flurivole and offered them half his wealth if they would intercede with the spirit world on his behalf for the return of his wife from the dead.
“And they attempted it, did they?”
He was silent a long moment, looking downward. Then he raised his face to mine and a look of terrible regret bordering on agony came into his eyes. He seemed to be staring past me into the darkest of abysses.
“Yes,” he said, barely audibly. “Finally they agreed. They asked the spirits, yes. And—and—”
He faltered. He fell silent.
I prodded him. “Nothing happened, of course.”
“Oh, yes, something happened,” he said, in that same soft, quavering voice. “But not the return of my wife.” And he looked away again, shivering as though in the grip of irremediable guilt and shame, and began to weep.
Macola Endrago said to me, when I told him that I was about to take my leave of Sippulgar, “It is for the best, I think. Seek your solace at home. We can give you no help here, for you are a man without belief.”
“You see that, do you?”
“I saw it from the first. When I told you how your wife’s brother met his death, you looked at me as though I were telling you children’s fables. When you pray in the chapel, you hold yourself like a man who wishes he were almost anywhere else. When you come up to take the cup you have no presence of the god about you. None of this is hard to see.” His voice came to me as though from far away, gentle, kindly, infinitely sad. “Return to your wife, my friend. You came here to solve a mystery, and I provided you with the information you needed, and you are unable to accept it. So you may as well go.”
“I’d be pleased to believe that the men were torn apart by those demons—Remmer, Proiarchis, are those the names?—if only I could. But I can’t. I can’t. There are no such beings.”
“No?”
“No,” I said. “Everything in my soul tells me that.”
He smiled his gentle, loving smile. “I offered to summon Theddim or Minim for you. You refused. Shall I give you another chance? I could bring up Remmer or Proiarchis, even. There would be risks, but I could do it, and then you would know the truth. Shall I? I would do that for you, my friend. I would embrace the risk, so that your eyes might be opened.” For a moment I wavered in the face of the inexorable force of his belief.
Again he smiled—that mild, sweet, saintly smile of his. And in his eyes, which were not mild or sweet or saintly at all, I saw the implacable will, the utter conviction, the invincible strength, that sustained his faith.
“Let me show you what you are so unwilling to see.”
I gasped and struggled for breath. Melifont may have been a fraud, but not this Endrago. I was burning in the awful fire of his sincerity. In that moment I felt sure that this man really had walked with demons. And now he will take me by the hand and lead me to them. I shuddered under the inexorable force of his belief. It fell upon me like a hammer. I wanted to run from him, but I was frozen where I stood.
“No,” I said once more, even as I stared bewilderedly into the darkness of the chapel.
That shape—that shadowy form with blazing eyes—
At that instant it seemed to me that the dread figure of Proiarchis was rearing up before me to tell me why Melifont Ambithorn and his partner had had to be slain.
I began to tremble. A door was opening. Fiercely I slammed it shut. I slammed it and held it with all my strength. As Macola Endrago reached out toward me I backed away. “Please. No.” And I said, though it was a lie and he surely was aware of that, “I know nothing about demons, and I want to know nothing about them. If such things as demons do exist.”
The saintly smile yet again. My heart shriveled under the heat of that smile. “If, indeed.”
“But let me say that if they do—if they do—I would never presume to ask you to take so great a risk on my behalf. If anything went wrong, I could never forgive myself.”
He showed no anger, no disappointment, no surprise.
“Very well,” he said, and our meeting was over.
The next day I left Sippulgar, hiring an express courier to get me back to Sisivondal as quickly as possible. And when at last I was with my wife Thuwayne again I told her that no one in Sippulgar had any real idea of what had happened to her brother, but that he had vanished and after the appropriate legal period had elapsed he had been declared officially dead, and the most probable explanation was that he had failed in business one last time, failed so completely that he had taken his own life to escape his creditors. More than that, I said, we will never know. And I think that that last part, at least, is the truth.
7
The Seventh Shrine
One last steep ridge of the rough, boulder-strewn road lay between the royal party and the descent into Velalisier Plain. Valentine, who was leading the way, rode up over it and came to a halt, looking down with amazement into the valley. The land that lay before him seemed to have undergone a bewildering transformation since his last visit. “Look there,” the Pontifex said, bemused. “This place is always full of surprises, and here is ours.”
The broad shallow bowl of the arid plain spread out below them. From this vantage point, a little way east of the entrance to the archaeological site, they should easily have been able to see a huge field of sand-swept ruins. There had been a mighty city here once, that notorious Shapeshifter city where, in ancient times, so much dark history had been enacted, such monstrous sacrilege and blasphemy. But—surely it was just an illusion?—the sprawling zone of fallen buildings at the center of the plain was almost completely hidden now by a wondrous rippling body of water, pale pink along its rim and pearly gray at its middle: a great lake where no lake ever had been.
Evidently the other members of the royal party saw it too. But did they understand that it was simply a trick? Some fleeting combination of sunlight and dusty haze and the stifling midday heat must have created a momentary mirage above dead Velalisier, so that it seemed as if a sizable lagoon, of all improbable things, had sprung up in the midst of this harsh desert to engulf the dead city.
It began just a short distance beyond their vantage point and extended as far as the distant gray-blue wall of great stone monoliths that marked the city’s western boundary. Nothing of Velalisier could be seen. None of the shattered and time-worn temples and palaces and basilicas, nor the red basalt blocks of the arena, the great expanses of blue stone that had been the sacrificial platforms, the tents of the archaeologists who had been at work here at Valentine’s behest since late last year. Only the six steep and narrow pyramids that were the tallest surviving structures of the prehistoric Metamorph capital were visible—their tips, at least, jutting out of the gray heart of the ostensible lake like a line of daggers fixed point-upward in its depths.