'What ails them?' he asked.
Brokeface's laugh hacked in the grainy air. 'Well said, stranger. You have cold iron in your spine, I'll give you that.'
Idiot. I wasn't trying to be funny.
'Get off that damned horse,' Brokeface said, blocking the doorway. He licked his misshapen lips, both hands shifting on the shaft of the scythe.
'Not a chance,' Paran said. 'I know how you take care of horses.'
'You cannot ride into the altar chamber!'
'Clear the way,' Paran said. 'This beast does not bother biting – it prefers to kick and stamp. Delights in the sound of breaking bones, in fact.'
As the horse, nostrils flared, stepped closer to the doorway, Brokeface flinched, edged back. Then he bared his crooked teeth and hissed, 'Can't you feel her wrath? Her outrage? Oh, you foolish man!'
'Can she feel mine?'
Paran ducked as his horse crossed the threshold. He straightened a moment later. A woman writhed on the tiles to his left, her dark skin streaked in sweat, her long limbs trembling as the plague-fouled air stroked and slipped round her, languid as a lover's caress.
Beyond this woman rose a dais atop three broad, shallow steps on which were scattered the broken fragments of the altarstone. Centred on the dais, where the altar had once stood, was a throne fashioned of twisted, malformed bones. Commanding this seat, a figure radiating such power that her form was barely discernible. Long limbs, suppurating with venom, a bared chest androgynous in its lack of definition, its shrunken frailty; the legs that extended outward seemed to possess too many joints, and the feet were three-toed and taloned, raptorial yet as large as those of an enkar'al. Poliel's eyes were but the faintest of sparks, blurred and damp at the centre of black bowls. Her mouth, broad and the lips cracked and oozing, curled now into a smile.
'Soletaken,' she said in a thin voice, 'do not frighten me. I had thought, for a moment… but no, you are nothing to me.'
'Goddess,' Paran said, settling back on his horse, 'I remain turned away. The choice is mine, not yours, and so you see only what I will you to see.'
'Who are you? What are you?'
'In normal circumstances, Poliel, I am but an arbiter. I have come to make an offering.'
'You understand, then,' the Grey Goddess said, 'the truth beneath the veil. Blood was their path. And so we choose to poison it.'
Paran frowned, then he shrugged and reached into the folds of his shirt. 'Here is my gift,' he said. Then hesitated. 'I regret, Poliel, that these circumstances… are not normal.'
The Grey Goddess said, 'I do not understand-'
'Catch!'
A small, gleaming object flashed from his hand.
She raised hers in defence.
A whispering, strangely thin sound marked the impact. Impaling her hand, a shard of metal. Otataral.
The goddess convulsed, a terrible, animal scream bursting from her throat, ripping the air. Chaotic power, shredding into tatters and spinning away, waves of grey fire charging like unleashed creatures of rage, mosaic tiles exploding in their wake.
On a bridling, skittish horse, Paran watched the conflagration of agony, and wondered, of a sudden, whether he had made a mistake.
He looked down at the mortal woman, curled up on the floor. Then at her fragmented shadow, slashed through by… nothing. Well, I knew that much. Time's nearly up.
A different throne, this one so faint as to be nothing more than the hint of slivered shadows, sketched across planes of dirty ice – oddly changed, Quick Ben decided, from the last time he had seen it.
As was the thin, ghostly god reclining on that throne. Oh, the hood was the same, ever hiding the face, and the gnarled black hand still perched on the knotted top of the bent walking stick – the perch of a scavenger, like a one-legged vulture – and emanating from the apparition that was Shadowthrone, like some oversweet incense reaching out to brush the wizard's senses, a cloying, infuriating… smugness.
Nothing unusual in all of that. Even so, there was… something…
'Delat,' the god murmured, as if tasting every letter of the name with sweet satisfaction.
'We're not enemies,' Quick Ben said, 'not any longer, Shadowthrone.
You cannot be blind to that.'
'Ah but you wish me blind, Delat! Yes yes yes, you do. Blind to the past – to every betrayal, every lie, every vicious insult you have delivered foul as spit at my feet!'
'Circumstances change.'
'Indeed they do!'
The wizard could feel sweat trickling beneath his clothes. Something here was… what?