Chaji lifted his gaze just enough to let Kesh know he was looking. Those pretty eyes didn’t impress Kesh; glaring, he crossed his arms.

“Go on,” said Tohon, voice like the snap of a whip.

Kesh grabbed his small pack; everything else they’d left at a stable in the village of Dast Olo, by the pier where they’d taken boats to the temple island. Behind, he heard Chaji murmur, his words too faint to understand, and Tohon’s curt rejoinder. He reached the gate, set a hand on the painted door, and paused before stepping into the garden of gold. From inside, he heard the spill of water into a basin; he heard laughter. A woman was singing a familiar song in time to the beat of a hand drum and the rhythm of shaken bells: I paused inside the gate and beheld the garden.

“Keshad!” A youth wearing the casual kilt of the off-duty acolyte stood over by the white gates, beckoning to him.

The hells! Kesh walked over to the youth, where Tohon met them.

“It seems you and I are called to the council,” said the soldier to Kesh. “Chaji waits here. The rest—hu!—let’s hope they behave.”

Back on the bench, half concealed at this angle by the arbors and flowering trees, Chaji sat in sullen silence, fists pressed in his lap.

“The Hieros wants you right now,” said the temple lad impatiently.

Kesh and Tohon followed him through the white gates into a courtyard filled with a tangle of vegetation. A narrow path littered with petals and old leaves cushioned their steps.

“Hu!” muttered Tohon. “What a thick forest! I can see nothing.” His gaze darted this way and that, and once he stopped and abruptly brushed at his face. Then he stared into the shadowed branches. Draped on a limb, a ginny stared at the Qin with a look Kesh recognized as amusement.

“Huh!” grunted Tohon. “That’s the male Zubaidit keeps. She let him go.”

“They’re the goddess’s acolytes,” the lad called over his shoulder. “They belong here, truly. Anyway, the Hieros doesn’t like to be kept waiting. She’s got many more things to accomplish today, and wants this business finished and closed.”

Kesh wiped his brow and scratched his chin. The shade gave relief against the sun, but the overwhelming scent of green growing things oppressed him. They strode out into the open space in the center where the fountain splashed, water tracing the strenuous curves of a man and woman intertwined in the act of devouring.

Tohon actually blushed, and looked away, gaze fixed on the back of the lad, who kept walking without a glance at the sculpture to another path on the far side of the clearing. This path wound through a jungle of spiky orange and yellow proudhorn and falls of purple muzz and white heaven-kiss, their scent almost too sweet. Tohon walked as if expecting an attack.

A steeply slanted tile roof rose from the greenery. They ascended a flight of stone steps, pressing through uncut shoots of musk vine that groped at Kesh’s body. He staggered into a pavilion of surpassing beauty: the pillars painted in gold leaf designs; the benches upholstered with rich fabrics so expensive that immediately his mind totted up their worth in days of labor and the price of slaves; the floor inlaid with a complicated pattern of precious woods. The lad threw out an arm before Kesh or Tohon could actually step onto the floor, and indicated that they must remove their shoes and then sit to one side on a pair of plain silk pillows.