Sparhawk nodded, then knelt briefly at Kurik’s side and took his squire’s hand. ‘Sleep well, my friend,’ he murmured. Then he rose and started up the stairs without looking back.

The stairs at the far end of that broad, straight pathway that stretched across the mole-tunnel mounds of the labyrinth below were very wide and sheathed with marble. There was no sliding wall to conceal a chamber at the foot of those stairs, and no maze led away from the temple. No maze was needed.

‘Wait here,’ Sparhawk whispered to his friends, ‘and put out those torches.’ He crept forward, pulled off his helmet and lay down at the top of the stairs. ‘Ulath,’ he murmured, ‘hold my ankles. I want to see what we’re getting into.’ With the huge Thalesian keeping him from tumbling in a steely clatter down the stairs, Sparhawk inched his way headfirst down the stairs until he could see out into the room beyond.

The temple of Azash was a place of nightmare. It was, as the dome which roofed it implied, circular, and it was fully half a mile across. The curving, inwardly-sloping walls were of polished black onyx, as was the floor. It was much like looking into the very heart of night. The temple was not lighted by torches but by huge bonfires flaring and roaring in enormous iron basins set on girder-like legs. The vast chamber was encircled by tier upon tier of polished black terraces stepping down and down and down to a black floor far beneath.

At evenly-spaced intervals along the top terrace were twenty-foot marble statues of things which were for the most part not human. Then Sparhawk saw a Styric form among them and somewhat further along an Elene one. He realized that the statues were representations of the servants of Azash, and that humanity played a very small and insignificant part in that assemblage. The other servants dwelt in places at once very far away and at the same time very, very close.