There, under the eastern colonnade of the atrium, Erlan watched as the emperor bowed in greeting first to a golden book, the magic of which Erlan still did not understand, and then to two priests, one dressed in white with a black hood, the other, older and more severe, garbed in gorgeous robes of gold and silver. This was the one they called the patriarch, Erlan guessed. The most powerful of their holy men who seemed to rank higher than almost everyone in the city, except for the emperor himself. Behind the old greybeard, the great rust-red stone facade loomed, a cascade of buttresses and pillars. Looking at it, of all that Erlan felt, the least he expected was a shiver of fear. Why should he be afraid of a building? He shook it off as silliness. Emperor and patriarch turned to enter, and behind them almost the whole city made ready to follow them inside.

They crossed one threshold, a second, a third – each bigger than the last, each increasing his anticipation. He tried to brace himself for what was to come, but how could he really? Who could be prepared for the extraordinary wonder that struck his eye when he followed the other guards under the massive stone lintel into that giant’s hall?

Valhalla, he thought, breathlessly. Surely I am in Valhalla. Here was a hall to house the gods if ever one had been built. He fixed his head straight ahead while his eyes roved and darted around the vast chasm of stone, all the while asking how. How could human hands build this monstrous mountain and then hollow it out with such delicacy, such deftness, that somehow a colossal weight of stone floated like a cloud far above his head? Such weightlessness, such beauty. How? If he had been allowed to speak, he would have uttered no sound; astonishment had stolen every word.

He told himself to pull his wits out of the stars and forced his attention back to his situation. There was some exchange between patriarch and Emperor at the screen of pillars near the eastern end of the church, set behind a little raised platform of white stone. The emperor carried forward a large golden bowl beyond the screen which, Erlan saw through the pillars, he laid upon some kind of table covered in golden cloth. An altar, Erlan supposed, though there was no blood upon it, as yet. The guard of honour, meanwhile, took up position to the right of this, behind the green and purple columns in the south-east corner of the great hall, where a small gilded throne – positively discreet by the standards of the palace – awaited the emperor.

Soon enough the emperor re-emerged from behind the screen and took his seat while the patriarch approached a far grander and more prominent throne, placed at the centre of a semicircle of tiered stone benches immediately behind the altar, which were slowly filling with the lesser priests.