They were not alone, of course. They were never alone. Zalasta, his own face gaunt with weariness, talked on and on with King Santheocles. Ehlana was too tired to make any sense of the haggard Styric’s droning words. She absently looked at the King of the Cyrgai, a man in a close-fitting steel breastplate, a short leather kirtle and ornate steel wrist-guards. Santheocles was of a race apart, and generations of selective breeding had heightened those features most admired by his people. He was tall and superbly muscled. His skin was very fair, although his carefully curled and oiled hair and beard were glossy black. Ffis nose was straight, continuing the unbroken line of his forehead.
His eyes were very large and very dark—and totally empty. His expression was haughty, cruel. His was the face of a stupid, arrogant man devoid of compassion or even simple decency. His ornate breastplate left his upper arms and shoulders bare, and as he listened, he absently clenched and relaxed his fists, setting his muscles to writhing and dancing under his pale skin. He was obviously not paying much attention to Zalasta’s words, but sat instead totally engrossed in the rhythmic flexing and relaxing of the muscles in his arms. He was in all respects a perfect soldier, possessed of a superbly-conditioned body and mind unviolated by thought.
Ehlana wearily let her eyes drift again around the room. The furniture was strange. There were no chairs as such, only benches and padded stools with ornate arms but no backs. Evidently the notion of a chair-back had not occurred to the Cyrgai. The table in the center of the room was awkwardly low, and the lamps were of an ancient design, no more than hammered copper bowls of oil with burning wicks floating in them. The roughly sawed boards of the floor were covered with rushes, the walls of square-cut black basalt were unadorned, and the windows were undraped.
The door opened and Ekatas entered. Ehlana struggled to bring her exhausted mind into focus. Santheocles was king here in Cyrga, but it was Ekatas who ruled. The High Priest of Cyrgon was robed and cowled in black, and his aged face was a network of deep wrinkles. Although his expression was every bit as cruel and arrogant as that of his king, his eyes were shrewd, ruthless. The front of his black robe was adorned with the symbol that seemed to be everywhere here in the Hidden City, a white square surmounted by a stylized golden flame. There was some significance there certainly, but Ehlana was too tired to even wonder what it might be. ‘Come with me,’ he commanded abruptly. ‘Bring the women.’
‘The servant girl is of no moment,’ Zalasta replied in a slightly challenging tone. ‘Let her sleep.’
‘I am not accustomed to having my commands questioned, Styric.’
‘Get accustomed, Cyrgai. The women are my prisoners. My arrangement is with Cyrgon, and you’re no more than an appendage to that arrangement. Your arrogance is beginning to annoy me. Leave the girl alone.’
Their eyes locked, and a sudden tension filled the room. ‘Well, Ekatas?’ Zalasta said very quietly. ‘Has the time come? Have you finally worked up enough courage to challenge me? Any time, Ekatas. Any time at all.’
Ehlana, now fully alert, saw the flicker of fear in the eyes of Cyrgon’s priest. ‘Bring the Queen then,’ he said sullenly. ‘It is she whom Cyrgon would behold.’
‘Wise decision, Ekatas,’ Zalasta said sardonically. ‘If you keep making the right choices, you might even live for a little while longer.’
Ehlana took her cloak and gently covered Alcan with it. Then she turned to face the three men. ‘Let’s get on with this,’ she told them, mustering some remnant of her royal manner.
Santheocles rose woodenly to his feet and put on his highcrested helmet, taking great pains to avoid mussing his carefully arranged hair. He spent several moments buckling on his large round shield, and then he drew his sword.
‘What an ass,’ Ehlana noted scornfully. ‘Are you really sure you should trust His Majesty with anything sharp, though? He might hurt himself with it, you know.’
‘It is customary, woman,’ Ekatas replied stiffly. ‘Prisoners are always kept under close guard.’
‘Ah,’ she murmured, ‘and we must obey the dictates of custom, mustn’t we, Ekatas? When custom rules, thought is unnecessary.’
Zalasta smiled faintly. ‘I believe you wanted to take us to the temple, Ekatas. Let’s not keep Cyrgon waiting.’
Ekatas choked back a retort, jerked the door open and led them out into the chilly hallway. The stairs that descended from the topmost tower of the royal palace were narrow and steep, endless stairs winding down and down. Ehlana was trembling by the time they reached the courtyard below.
The winter sun was very bright in that broad courtyard, but there was not much heat to it. They crossed the flagstoned courtyard to the pale temple, a building constructed not of marble but of chalky limestone. Unlike marble, the limestone had a dull, unreflective surface, and the temple looked somehow diseased, leprous.
They mounted the stairs to the portico and entered through a rude doorway. Ehlana had expected it to be dark inside this holy of Holies, but it was not. She stared with a certain apprehensive astonishment at the source of the light even as Ekatas and Santheocles prostrated themselves, crying in unison, ‘VBnet, Akor. Yala Cyrgon!’
And then it was that the Queen understood the significance of that ubiquitous emblem that marked virtually everything here in the Hidden City. The white square represented the blocky altar set in the precise center of the temple, but the flame that burned atop that altar was no stylized representation. It was instead an actual fire that twisted and flared, reaching hungrily upward.
Ehlana was suddenly afraid. The fire burning on the altar was not some votive offering, but a living flame, conscious, aware, and possessed of an unquenchable will. Bright as the sun, Cyrgon himself burned eternal on his pale altar.
‘No,’ Sparhawk decided. ‘We’d better not. Let’s just sit tight, at least until Xanetia has the chance to winnow through a few minds. We can always come back and deal with Scarpa and his friends later. Right now we need to know where Zalasta’s taking Ehlana and Alcan.’
‘We already know,’ Kalten said. ‘They’re going to Cyrga.’
‘That’s the whole point,’ the now-visible Ulath told him. ‘We don’t know where Cyrga is.’
They had gone back into the vine-choked ruins and had gathered on the second floor of a semi-intact palace to consider options.
‘Aphrael has a general idea,’ Kalten said. ‘Can’t we just start out for central Cynesga and do some poking around when we get there?’
‘I don’t think that’d do much good,’ Bevier pointed out. ‘Cyrgon’s been concealing the place with illusions for the past ten eons. We could probably walk right through the streets of the city and not even see it.’
‘He’s not hiding it from everybody,’ Caalador mused. ‘There are messages going back and forth, so somebody here in Natayos has to know the way. Sparhawk’s right. Why don’t we let Xanetia do the poking around here, instead of the lot of us going off into the desert to dodge scorpions and snakes while we turn over pebbles and grains of sand?’
‘We stay here then?’ Tynian asked.
‘For the time being,’’ Sparhawk replied. ‘Let’s not do anything to attract attention until we find out what Xanetia can discover. That’s our best option at the moment.’
‘We were so close.’ Kalten fumed. ‘If we’d just gotten here a day or two earlier.”
‘Well, we didn’t,’ Sparhawk said flatly, forcing back his own disappointment and frustration. ‘So let’s make the best of it and salvage what we can.’
‘With Zalasta getting further and further away with every minute,’ Kalten added bitterly.
‘Don’t worry, Kalten,’ Sparhawk told him in a tone as cold as death. ‘Zalasta can’t run far enough or fast enough to get away from me when I decide to go after him.’
‘Are you busy, Sarabian?’ Empress Elysoun asked tentatively from the doorway of the blue-draped room.