Zuangua nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. We must kill all the human sorcerers. They are the most dangerous of all.”

Feather Cloak raised both hands, palms facing heaven, to allow the gods a glimpse into her soul. “I accept his offer of alliance. I offer him in turn the woman called Liathano.”

“What of a powerful offering for the gods?” demanded the blood knives. “What of your promise to us?”

“You can have her afterward,” said Feather Cloak, and she smiled mockingly at them. “If you can bind her.”

“This is a bad thing,” muttered Secha.

“To protect ourselves is a bad thing?”

“To seal an agreement on a lie is a bad thing.”

But Kansi-a-lari, The Impatient One, was Feather Cloak now.

“I have spoken,” she said irritably.

She beckoned to Sun Hair. She let him approach her. The prisoners watched in dread and anger, and her company watched with an intense excitement so palpable that it seemed to Secha that the ground trembled beneath the soles of her feet, shaken by their eagerness.

These were the tokens they exchanged: He gave to Feather Cloak an iron feather whose essence was so pure that it gleamed with a light all its own. She gave to him a folded mantle, a humble item, to be sure, but he pressed the cloth to his face as though it were the end of his desire.

Thus was the bargain sealed, and their path chosen.

9

MIDNIGHT—or as close to midnight as they could estimate, since no stars were visible to measure out time. They measured by psalms instead, and when they finished singing “Vindicate me, God, for I have walked without blame,” all quieted.

Because the church in Novomo had been built in the waning years of the Dariyan Empire, it boasted an impressive processional frieze worked into both walls of the nave above the twin rows of columns that separated the nave from the aisles on either side. In those shadowed aisles waited courtiers and servants, their faces unseen except as pale washes marked by the dark stones that were their eyes and the occasional flash of a ring or gold necklace catching candlelight. Above the waiting masses, the frieze marked the ascent of saints and martyrs toward the Hearth. Each held a saint’s crown to place before God. The colored stones in the mosaic shimmered to mark their holy robes and their holy crowns. Even their eyes shone; in this way the saints differ from the guilty who live and suffer on Earth, whose eyes are only pits in whose depths the righteous can discern the black stain of the Enemy.

Candlelight alone lit the church except for a single oil lamp placed on the Hearth itself and burning with the confidence and constancy of the just. By the smoky flames of threescore slender candles the ancient faces of the holy saints and martyrs watched and judged, their serene expressions caught forever in mosaics so cunningly worked that they almost appeared to be a painting. In the empty nave, threescore clerics lined up in two rows. Each cleric carried a taper in cupped hands. Back by the portico, Empress Adelheid and her consort waited under a mosaic rendering of the old palace that had once stood in Novomo; that structure was now half buried within the new palace, which had been erected about a hundred years ago and restored and remodeled several times since then.