But Ariadel's mood seemed to lift as they closed in on the temple by midday, and Vidarian listened with genuine interest as she described the history of the various parts of the architecture and the paved road that led to it. It was a much finer way of approaching the temple, he decided, than being carried in unconscious.
Their welcome, too, differed night and day from his first visit. Acolytes stood waiting for them at the temple doors, panels of carved red ironwood that stood three times a man's height. One of them took the verali, leading them off to an outbuilding as soon as Ariadel had taken the paper spider boxes from the packs. She carried them gingerly and led the way through the temple doors.
“I'll need to see Endera right away.” She turned apologetically to Vidarian. “But they'll have prepared quarters for us both.”
“We have,” the remaining acolyte said, and her eyes were round and blue and large as she addressed Vidarian. “Lady Endera has prepared a private banquet in honor of your arrival, my lord-”
“It's Captain.”
“-my lord Captain,” the acolyte corrected with a deep bow of apology, and Vidarian swallowed a sigh. “If you'll be so kind as to follow me, I can escort you to our bathing house, and your quarters.”
Vidarian lowered beseeching eyebrows at Ariadel, but she only lifted the spider boxes gently in encouragement. “Some hot water would do us both good,” she said. “I'll see you at dinner, Captain.”
“All right.” He surrendered with lifted hands. “Lead the way.”
By the time he was seated at the alabaster banquet table, Vidarian was glad indeed of the temple's opulent bathhouse, though he could swear he still detected a hint of verali musk on his skin. Perhaps Ariadel was right about the smelly creatures. He found himself smiling as he thought of her reclining at the Lustrous Pearl, and mastered his features with conscious effort.
Endera joined them some time after Ariadel arrived, accompanied, rather to Vidarian's surprise, by Thalnarra. Despite the presence of the huge gryphoness, the four of them were dwarfed by the high-ceilinged banquet hall and vast alabaster dining table, and their voices echoed. The two golden spiders had been invited as well, it seemed-each occupied a mesh terrarium filled with thick green-leafed branches.
“Welcome, Captain,” Endera said, bringing her hands together in a gesture of goodwill before she sat at the head of the table. “You return to us an invaluable treasure.” She touched Ariadel's arm gently, and Ariadel gave a demure bow of her head, but Vidarian did not miss how her eyes searched Endera's expression beneath lowered eyelashes. Vidarian himself had not known what to expect from the Sher'azar priestess, now that he was…what he was. But he allowed himself a measure of cautious relief that Endera's demeanor toward him had not changed.
“As agreed,” he said, watching her. “A Rulorat does not fail a contract.”
“Indeed not.” Endera's teeth glowed in the candlelight with her smile. She lifted a hand, and a pair of robed acolytes entered, one moving to turn over each diner's teacup and the other filling them with a pale steaming drink from a silver urn. When the first had turned over all of the cups, she lifted the cover from a porcelain bowl set between them, revealing a heap of wine-red sun cherries, and bowed out of the room with the tea carrier.
Vidarian lifted his tea to stop himself from gaping at the fruit. He had never seen more than a handful of them in the same place in his life, and knew none who had. Endera plucked about that many from the bowl with a set of silver tongs and proceeded to spoon a frothy sugared cream over them with staggering familiarity. He waited until Ariadel had taken a portion before setting down the tea and selecting his own, resisting the urge to put a price on each thumb-sized fruit that hit his plate.
The flavor was extraordinary, as it always was. The summer intensity and gentle sweetness of them took him back to nearly forgotten early childhood, when his mother had strong-armed his father into purchasing three of them for his birthday. And, he had to admit, the cream balanced their vivid tartness perfectly.
“No one,” he said at last, “has really explained to me just what the Tesseract is.”
Thalnarra's crushed-paper chuckle brought the hair on the back of his neck up, much as he should have been used to it by now. The gryphoness had been watching the cherry bowl dwindle with what Vidarian assumed was a mild curiosity, but at Vidarian's question she reached across the table and, with surprising delicacy, lifted a cherry between two hooked claws.
// The Tesseract seals the Great Gate, // she said, as she had on the Sunstar, // because he bridges Substantive and Ephemeral magics. // With a disregard for fabric that made Endera stiffen ever so slightly, Thalnarra pierced the cherry and proceeded to draw a diagram on one of the table's cloth napkins. The juice stained the white fabric scarlet, and she doled it out with gentle claw pressure until a diamond shape emerged. // Air, // she indicated the top corner of the diamond with a droplet of juice, // Earth, // the bottom, // Fire, // the left, // Water, // the right. // And this is you. // She rent the cherry deeply then, drawing a stream between the left and right points of the blurry diagram. // Centuries ago, the Great Gate was closed, but as the years pass the influence of what lay behind it grows. You represent that change, and have the power to seal the gate. //
The emptiness in the center of the diagram, crossed by “him,” somehow turned Vidarian's guts to water. “What's in the middle, there?”
“It is theoretical,” Endera still looked slightly sour for the ruining of her napkin. “Referred to as ‘void,’ and described in some connection to telepathic abilities, and other magics since lost.”
“The other elements have goddesses,” Vidarian blinked against a moment of lightheadedness. “Who is the goddess of the void?”
Ariadel laughed, and her merriment was a flash of silver in Vidarian's thoughts. “There is no goddess of chaos.” She twinkled with mirth, visibly lingering over the absurdity of Vidarian's suggestion-and clearly unaware, as Vidarian was not, of Endera's hands subtly clenched around her teacup. He met her eyes, only briefly, and the grip eased, smoothly, as though without thought.
Vidarian cleared his throat, then took up his tea and sipped it. One of his eyebrows leapt up in curiosity toward Endera before he could quite help himself. The tea was delicate but unsophisticated, surely no prize leaf from the surrounding mountains for which the temple was so renowned-and yet both Endera and Ariadel tipped their cups carefully, as though it were priceless.
“Simplicity, my dear Vidarian,” Endera said only. “We are but a simple priestesshood.”
“And what does this simple priestesshood want of me, Endera? For I suspect all this-“ he took in the hall with a swept hand “-is not merely trapping for the delivery of my sun rubies.”
The priestess smiled. She tapped her knuckles lightly on the table, and the acolytes returned, bearing covered platters that trailed wisps of curling steam. Seeming by chance, but surely it wasn't, the acolytes lifted the silver covers in order: Thalnarra, Endera, Ariadel, and finally Vidarian. Beneath was an artfully arranged spiral of sliced meat-runnerbird, he thought, in a light herbed oil.
“We merely wish to advise you,” Endera said, as they picked up forks, “to prevent you from making, shall we say, avoidable mistakes.”
“Such as?” Vidarian asked, scooping up and eating a polite forkful of the sliced meat. And then dropping the fork with a clatter he saw but did not hear, as unbelievable spice roared up to close his throat and even his ears as he coughed instinctively-managing only with the aid of years of diplomatic drilling to avoid spraying meat and sauce all over the table. His eyes filled with water and the room vanished into heat and color.
“Lambwillow tea,” Endera was saying, when his ears finally cleared enough. “It has certain pepper-amplifying properties.”
“We drink it so often, I'd forgotten,” Ariadel was apologizing, and her own cheeks were flushed, whether with an echo of his pain or mere abashedness, he wasn't sure. Truly, I'd have warned you, she insisted in his mind, and he thought forgiveness at her, but wasn't sure if their connection worked that way.
“These ‘avoidable mistakes,'” Vidarian began.
The doors to the dining room banged open, an admirable feat for such large panels of wood, and what stepped across the threshold threw Vidarian to his feet before he quite knew what he was doing. His sword, brought for ceremony, sang from its sheath, then, exposed, leapt with energy-fire and water, this time his own.
“So it's true,” the first hooded figure said, throwing back her black velvet headpiece to reveal blonde curls and piercing grey eyes. “He is the Tesseract-and you've kept him from us, Endera.” The look she-Vkortha? Priestess?-turned on Vidarian made his stomach turn: fervent. Mad.
Endera, too, was on her feet, standing in Thalnarra's path, which seemed altogether unwise. The gryphoness had summoned a halo of blinding fire energy, visible now to Vidarian's kindled sight, but without this, her pinning eyes and near-vertically stiffened feathers told any wise prey animal to find another acre as far away as possible. “This was not our agreement, Aleha.” Endera's voice was tightly controlled, pitched low to avert gryphon murder.
It didn't work. // Your agreement? // Thalnarra thundered, and reared, flaring her wings in spite of the closed space. One of the spider terrariums was caught by an outflung primary and clattered to the floor, its spider sent scuttling from the room.
Endera, Aleha, and her still-hooded attendant fell back toward the door, and only Vidarian's voice stopped Thalnarra from leaping upon them: “Explain yourself, Endera. Quickly.” As they moved, his swordpoint remained trained on the Vkortha who had spoken. In the dance of fire and water about the blade, crackles of energy snapped between his aura and Thalnarra's.
“There are no Vkortha. These women are Nistran priestesses, envoys from Zal'nehara,” Endera said.
“No. We serve the Starhunter now, Endera,” Aleha said.
Endera spun, her eyes wide. “Madness!” she hissed, and in spite of her betrayal, the sheer alarm in her voice chilled Vidarian's spine. Aleha's eyes were wild, ecstatic.
In the chaos, Thalnarra's voice was acrid smoke in Vidarian's mind alone. // I knew nothing of this. Endera has made a fatal error. I am making arrangements. Their minds slip from mine like fishguts, //-the last in frustrated disbelief.
“They'll not have Ariadel, I don't give a damn the reasons why,” Vidarian began.
“Your mistake, Vidarian, is in thinking she is half so valuable to us as you are,” Endera murmured, and Ariadel choked-her thoughts radiated confusion, heartache, fury. “And you'll not abandon her here, we both know it.”
“No,” Ariadel said, her voice distant, numb. “He won't.”
// This is a deep betrayal, Endera. // The word “betrayal” had a cloud of thoughts connected to it, smoky tendrils of a complex language altogether inhuman.
“I am sorry, Thalnarra.”
// You have no idea yet how sorry. //
Ariadel looked across the table at him.
Vidarian, the name was a whisper in his mind, a quickening of his being. “Run.” They breathed the command together.
Vidarian leapt across the table, and Thalnarra let out a deafening shriek that nearly stopped his heart. Thalnarra, Aleha, and the other Vkorthan priestess staggered away from the door, and Vidarian and Ariadel fled through, Thalnarra quick on their heels. Ariadel grabbed Vidarian's hand and led him at a run through the maze of temple passageways; Endera's voice echoed behind them, a command to her acolytes: “Control this situation!”