But we are cold in our desires, the High Priestess and I. There is no heat in our plans, and the poses we will create invite no caress. She takes no men to her bed, not any more. The gate, as Cedorpul might say, has closed.

Yet her priestesses still swim the deep carnal seas, and call it worship.

But Mother Dark is no goddess of love. We were mistaken in that, and now lust boils unabated. We rush forward, with no time to temper our deeds with thought. The reins have been plucked from our hands, and this road we descend is steep.

Let us hold on a while longer, to this delusion of control.

Reaching the door to Emral Lanear’s chamber, Herat gave a single tug on the silk cord hanging in its vertical niche in the wall. Hearing her muffled invitation, he opened the heavy door and stepped into the room beyond.

Until recently, there had been a full-length mirror of polished silver set against the wall opposite the door that had commanded the entire chamber with its play of motion and seemingly sourceless light. Rise Herat had found it disquieting, as the polish was far from perfect, and indeed there were strange dips and exaggerations in the reflection the mirror offered, making it an enemy to vanity. Of late, however, a thick tapestry had covered the mirror, as it did now. Initially, Herat had wondered at the gesture, but not for long. This was not the time, he understood, for catching glimpses of oneself, like flitting thoughts or hints of something that might be guilt.

The tapestry covering the mirror was an old one, depicting a scene from an unfamiliar court, a crowded throne room in which figures bedecked in barbaric furs were arrayed in a half-circle, their backs to the viewer, all facing a vaguely female form seated on a throne. This woman was either asleep or dead. The splendour of the throne room offered a stark contrast to the savages gathered there, displaying such riches as to make the chamber more like a royal vault than a court. For all Rise Herat’s knowledge of history, he could place neither the artist nor the scene.

But nothing of the past held any relevance, not any more. It had become a realm made perfect by virtue of being unreachable. For all that, its lure remained, as seductive as ever. Entire revolutions, he knew, could be unleashed in the name of some impossible, mostly imagined past. A creation fashioned as much from ignorance as from knowledge. Such dreamers invariably ended up wallowing in blood, and should they ever win their desire, their world proved to be one filled with repression and terror. There was too much anger, when the dream was revealed as being impossible, and when others failed to match the ideal, and before long many were made to kneel, broken by either fear or despair, while the bodies of those who refused to kneel made heaps in hastily dug pits.