A shudder ran through the Augurer’s body and the fingers suddenly lifted from Orial’s.

‘She? The Goddess? Elesstar?’

The Augurer did not reply.

‘Tell me,’ Orial pleaded.

The Augurer turned and went drifting away until the cloud-gauzed figure was obscured by the gusting steam.

Orial sighed. She had come for answers – and had found only further questions.

Dragonflies. Even on the most ancient of Temple stone carvings, the stelae, the motif prevailed. Symbols of the souls of the dead, flying from the darkness of the Undercity to the light of day beyond.

The funerary stelae of the Lifhendil still lined the passageways of the Under Temple.

Orial’s fingers hovered over the carving, tracing the worn images. She could never understand why the Lifhendil had abandoned all sense of proportion and scale in their engraving of these ancient stones. Here the dragonflies had been carved the same size as the officiating priests and priestesses. She peered more closely at the carved figures. The slim bodies of the dragonflies could almost be human; from this angle it was possible to see them as winged men and women, winged messengers from the otherworld, come to carry the souls of the dead…

Bordering the image were the intricately carved slashes and squirls that Jolaine Tradescar insisted were inscriptions in the lost tongue of the Lifhendil. But as she had failed so far to crack the code, her theories had been dismissed by eminent scholars and the true function of the stelae remained unknown.

‘A flight of dragonflies?’ Orial whispered.

In the Upper Temple stood the painted statue of Elesstar, one hand benignly extended, the other supporting a vase from which poured perpetually the spring waters which the worshippers dutifully drank, lukewarm and brackish. The Allegondan import stared smilingly down at the faithful, her features bland and regular; her carven hair was painted yellow, inlaid with gold leaf, her eyes painted blue and her lips red. Deified, she little resembled the Shultan’s concubine who had given up her life of luxury at court to follow the prophet Mhir. Orial had always suspected that the historical Elesstar was Lifhendil – not this smiling Allegondan saint, eyes piously upraised to heaven.

Reason and enlightenment prevailed in the Upper Temple. But below… below she had just experienced the power of an older, darker, mysticism.

The legacy of the Lifhendil.

*

All night the notes rampaged around Khassian’s head. Swirling, savage strettos; new melodies that swooped and darted like an arrow-flight of swallows; climaxes that climbed and climbed to teeter on the brink of a crumbling abyss.

Next morning at first light he blundered into Cramoisy’s boudoir. He had devised a method of depressing the door handles with one elbow that permitted him to move – albeit clumsily – from room to room.

The Diva lay in a bed draped with primrose taffeta, a colour horribly at odds with his flamboyant hair.

‘Cramoisy, you’ve got to help me.’