The palace reared like a mountain in the centre of Zemoch. There were towers, of course. Palaces always have towers, but the rough black spires clawing at the air above the main building had no grace, no balance and in most cases no evident purpose. Many of them had been started centuries before and then never finished. They jutted into the air, half-completed and surrounded by the rotting remains of crude scaffolding. The palace did not exude so much a sense of evil as it did of madness, of a kind of frenzied but purposeless effort.

Beyond the palace Sparhawk could see the swelling dome of the temple of Azash, a perfect rusty-black hemisphere constructed of huge, rigidly symmetrical hexagonal blocks of basalt which gave it the appearance of the nest of some enormous insect or some vast infected wound.

The area surrounding the palace and the adjoining temple was a kind of paved dead zone where there were no buildings nor trees nor monuments. It was simply a flat place extending out perhaps two hundred yards from the walls. It was lighted on this darkest of nights by thousands of torches thrust at random into the cracks between the flagstones to form what almost appeared to be a knee-high field of tossing fire.

The broad avenue which the knights were following appeared to continue directly across the fiery plaza to the main portal of the house of Otha, where it entered with undiminished breadth through the widest and highest pair of arched doors Sparhawk had ever seen. Those doors stood ominously open.

The guards stood in the space between the walls and that broad grain-field of torches. They were armoured, but their armour was more fantastic than any Sparhawk had ever seen. Their helmets had been wrought into the shape of skulls, and they were surmounted by branching steel antlers. The various joints – shoulder and elbow, hip and knee – were decorated with long spikes and flaring protrusions. Their forearms were studded with hooks, and the weapons they grasped were not so much weapons of death but of pain, with saw-tooth edges and razor-like barbs. Their shields were large and hideously painted.

Sir Tynian was Deiran, and Deirans from time immemorial have been the world’s experts on armour. ‘Now that’s the most idiotic display of pure childishness I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he said contemptuously to the others during a momentary lull in the thunder.

‘Oh?’ Kalten said.

‘Their armour’s almost useless. Good armour is supposed to protect the man wearing it but to give him a certain freedom of movement. There’s not much point in turning yourself into a turtle.’

‘It looks sort of intimidating, though.’

‘That’s all it really is – something worn for its appearance. All those spikes and hooks are useless, and worse yet, they’ll just guide an opponent’s weapon to vulnerable points. What were their armourers thinking of?’