King Wargun had lifted the apparently unconscious Ehlana in his arms and was carrying her towards the bronze door at one side of the chamber.

‘Go to her,’ Sephrenia said to Mirtai. ‘Try to keep her calm. She’s very exhilarated right now – and don’t let King Wargun come back in here. He might blurt something out and ruin everything.’

Mirtai nodded and rushed down to the floor.

The chamber was alive with excited conversation. Ehlana’s fire and passion had ignited them all. Patriarch Emban sat with his eyes wide in stunned amazement. Then he grinned broadly, and then he covered his mouth with one hand and began to laugh.

‘– obviously possessed by the Divine Hand of God himself,’ one nearby monk was saying excitedly to another. ‘But a woman? Why would God speak to us in the voice of a woman?’

‘His ways are mysterious,’ the other monk said in an awed voice, ‘and unfathomable to man.’

It was with some difficulty that Patriarch Dolmant restored order. ‘My brothers and friends,’ he said. ‘We must, of course, forgive the Queen of Elenia for her emotional outburst. I have known her since childhood, and I assure you that she is normally a completely self-possessed young woman. It is doubtless as she herself suggested. The last traces of the poison still linger and make her sometimes irrational.’

‘Oh, this is too rare,’ Stragen laughed to Sephrenia. ‘He doesn’t even know.’

‘Stragen,’ she said crisply, ‘hush.’

‘Yes, little mother.’

Patriarch Bergsten, mail-shirted and dreadful in his ogre-horned helmet, rose and rapped the butt of his war-axe on the marble floor. ‘Permission to speak?’ He didn’t actually ask.

‘Of course, Bergsten,’ Dolmant said.

‘We are not here to discuss the vapourish indisposition of the Queen of Elenia,’ the massive Patriarch of Emsat declared. ‘We are here to select an Archprelate. I suggest that we move on with it. To that end, I place in nomination the name of Dolmant, Patriarch of Demos. Who will join his voice with mine in this nomination?’

‘No!’ Dolmant exclaimed in stunned dismay.

‘The Patriarch of Demos is not in order,’ Ortzel declared, rising to his feet. ‘By custom and by law, as one who has been nominated, he may not speak further until this question has been decided. With the consent of my brothers, I would ask the esteemed Patriarch of Ucera to assume the chair.’ He looked around. There appeared to be no dissent.

Emban, still grinning openly, waddled to the lectern and rather cavalierly dismissed Dolmant with a wave of one chubby hand. ‘Has the Patriarch of Kadach concluded his remarks?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Ortzel said, ‘I have not.’ Ortzel’s face was still stern and bleak. Then, with no sign of the pain it must have caused him, he spoke firmly. ‘I join my voice with that of my brother of Emsat. Patriarch Dolmant is the only possible choice for the Archprelacy.’