I attempted to seek one such out, curiouse to see for myself, and was tolde there was a poore girl, greatly afflicted, in the Asylum. I made haste to see her, onlye to arrive to the sad news that, in her confusion and despair, she had thrown herselfe from the uppermost room the day before and had dashed out her brains on the cobbles below.

‘Oh,’ Orial whispered. She wanted to stop reading, to put the manuscript from her, but she could not.

The gift is not a perfect gift. It carryes the curse of madness with it. Lyke the rare and graceful dragonflyes which haunt the water-meadows here, the Songspinners live a short intense life, gladdening all with their unique talents before their genius is brutally extinguished in a cruel and devastating loss of reason known as the Accidie.

‘Madness,’ Orial looked up, unseeing, from the manuscript. ‘My mother went mad.’

The Temple of the Source stood in the very heart of the city. Here the people of Sulien gathered to pray at the source of the hot springs, to make votive offerings to Esstarel, Goddess of the Gap, and to celebrate the rites of passage. The original significance of many of the rituals had become lost in time… as had the true name of the Goddess. When, centuries ago, Allegondan invaders ransacked the city and massacred the Lifhendil, they had imposed their language, their customs, their religion. But they could not eradicate the potent influence of the Lifhendil tutelary goddess. Eventually the Allegondans identified her with Elesstar the Blessed, handmaiden of their god, Iel, and she endured in a strange fusion of the two beliefs. The Temple was rededicated to Iel but the older presence prevailed.

Orial went into the colonnades and entered the Temple. She paused a moment to dip her finger-tips in one of the founts of the living spring and mark her forehead with the warm mineral water, a gesture of respect she dimly remembered her mother making… and one she still practised if only to keep alive the memory of Iridial.

She moved swiftly through the dim, echoing spaces of the Temple, unable to rid herself of the impression she had first gained as a tiny child, clutching her mother’s hand, that she was floating below water. Verdigris light filtered in, limpidly cool, from the high, green-glass windows, casting shifting shadows on the pillars, sunlight filtering into the depths of deep waters… Maybe this was what the Lifhendil had intended the worshipper to feel, Orial thought, the loose, bodiless sensation of drifting in water, freeing the mind to meditate on higher matters… Even the bronze prayer-bells, their carvings blurred by the touch of countless devout worshippers, had turned green with age and their muted vibrations dinned in the Temple depths like the bells of a drowned city, deep beneath the waves.