The same color spills across the floor below, where someone has taken the time to intricately lay a mosaic of rock shards into what I can tell is a map, and yet, it looks like no map of ours, nor any I studied from ages past. It’s breathtaking in the loving detail paid to every nuance of land and sea. Even the scrollwork around it is a work of art.
“Look!” I hear Sir Kodelai call from twenty stairs below. “I can see Cantora on that map. She sank beneath the sea a thousand years ago with her great ships and their purple dyes.”
“And are those the Sephorus Islands?” I hear another paladin reply. “Before the mouth of the God opened and spewed out fire upon them?”
Strangest of all is how the artist has laid out the circle of the earth, dividing it out as if he had unraveled the peel of an orange and tried to reassemble it flat, rather than simply portraying the disk of the known earth.
I trace the edges of the mosaic with my gaze and follow them to the edges of the room, where white marble statues line the walls. They are so large that at first, I think there are cupboards carved in their bases, surrounded by sculpted roses. I realize, after a heartbeat, that they are doors to other rooms. Doors for men — but the nearest one is smaller than the foot of the statue towering over it. The roses clustered around it are large enough for me to curl up inside one and sleep like a honeybee.
I inspect the nearest statue — carved from white marble laced with gold veins. I’m not sure we could replicate it today, so intricate is the detail, so large is the scale. It depicts a bearded, half-naked man. A sword hangs from his scabbard; another is buried in his chest. Flowering vines twist up his legs. A chain wraps around his knees, binding them together, and each link of it is carved separately and interwoven. How long would that chain alone have taken to craft? A pair of wings fold tightly against his back and his mouth is an open cavern, his head tilted back unnaturally as if his jaw were broken. The whole of his head is levered up and back so that he looks as if he is swallowing a terrible brew. I feel my own lip curling in sympathy. The artist’s attention to detail only makes the result resonate that much more in the heart. The statue’s hands are lifted upward, each finger sculpted in loving detail to show the strain it takes for him to hold up the edge of the ceiling. I feel it, too.
I can barely snatch my eyes away to look at the next statue but when I do, he looks just like his fellow — if his fellow were dressed exactly like me. Beardless, like me. Haunted expression like —
“Like you,” the Vagabond Paladin breathes, breaking into my thoughts.
I look back at the first man. Mayhap if my angle were different, I would see Hefertus in the set of that jaw.
“And there’s me,” she says, her voice like the sound of someone who has just discovered they’ve been sealed into a jar of wriggling maggots.
I follow her pointed finger and there is her doppelganger. Her stone hair is tangled all around her in taunting deshabille, a single gauntlet and pauldron on one arm her only armor. The rest of her is hidden beneath artfully draped rags. There are butterflies in her hair and on her wrists, and her gauntleted hand grips the hilt of a sword that has been buried straight through her shapely thigh.
I feel my face grow hot as sunrise, as if — fool that I am — I think a marble statue formed thousands of years ago is somehow a representation of the flesh and blood woman beside me.
Oh, the payment the door took is hard indeed. I would have chosen differently.
I look back at my own semblance. I see now that his open mouth is full of something. It gushes down his chin and falls in cloying strands as far as his belt.
Were I a weaker man, I would flee this place right now. And, perhaps, I would return to my aspect and my story would simply be of how I saw terrors and left others to die. Or we might be at war with whichever aspect found the cup. Or, perhaps, I might be called mad.
Instead, I swallow and take another step, nearly colliding with the cursed dog, who looks almost as if he is laughing at me, though I know full well that dogs do not laugh. The bite wound in my thigh twinges in a reminder not to get too close to this one. He is no jester but a deadly threat. I almost think I see a red gleam in one of his eyes — a trick of the light, no doubt.
“Is …” The Beggar Paladin pauses to clear her throat. “Did it move, just now?”
I glance backward at her and regret it immediately. Her face is lit with the marigold of the sea and with equal parts horror and wonder. She has a little of the divine about her — enough of it that, were I not a holy paladin, I might be tempted to worship at her altar instead.
I have to clear my throat, too, but for other reasons. Even then, the end of my sentence takes a higher note than I’d meant it to.
“Did what move?”
“The demon trapped on the ceiling,” she says. And I follow her hand to where it grips the hilt of her sword and then follow her eyes up, up, up. “Did it move?”
On the ceiling of the great hall is a strange relief sculpture, but unlike the pure white of the ones below, this one is part gild and part jet black. The gilding follows the edges of what looks like a cutout of leaves and flowers, vines and branches, and scrollwork edged with rats and sharks, trumpets and daggers. But between the cutouts and under all that gilding is a mass of glossy black. I would have thought it was lacquer meant to enhance the gold. But my eye has trouble following its surface. It seems to twist beneath my eye as if my gaze is oil, slipping off the hidden form.
It is from this dark relief sculpture that I feel the pull I felt before. Something sings a single note to my heart, bids it come, bids it die. I feel the pull worse than hunger, worse than thirst.
And it is at the very peak of that culminating desire that I see the twitch.
Something in the inky darkness — something gleaming with just the barest edge of marigold — something has moved.
I feel my muscles go rigid and my bones nearly leap from my flesh when she sets a hand on my arm.
“Let’s go below,” she says in a tone slick with caution. “Look no more at the monster.”
My voice leaves me sounding hollow. “Monster? Is that what it is?”
“I hardly know. But I know evil. To look is to see. To see is to understand. To understand is to become. And to become is everything. Do not become evil, Sir Saint.”
Chapter Twelve
