Plain terracotta tile covered the floor, but the high vaulted redwood ceiling boasted a hundred thousand tiny half domes and cupolas.
A long grid of sandstone pillars supported the ceiling and made the expansive room feel like a forest. The pillars running along the outer walls supported horse shoe arches, their stones painted alternately green or white.
At one end of the hall stood a tall redwood throne, currently empty. Behind this, an ornate screen separated the hall from the dome’s black interior, where the canonist’s ark was housed.
Deirdre took in all this as she remembered Typhon examining the superficial aspects of her mind to discover if she was committed to the Disjunction. Deirdre had filled her heart with the desire to recover Boann, to save her from the coming chaos. In her core, Deirdre knew that to save her beloved she would abandon all her moral objections, all her schemes. Typhon interpreted this love as a willingness to try to convert Boann to the cause of the Disjunction.
She made sure that Typhon discovered this love. It was the lever he had worked into her soul during the long years of possession, the mechanism by which he believed he had converted her to the Disjunction.
Once satisfied that her feelings had not changed, the demon sent her to wait in the Hall of Ambassadors while he retrieved the Savanna Walker.
Presently, Deirdre stood before the room’s western wall, looking out one of the horse shoe arches at storm clouds rolling down from the Auburn Mountains. Despite the sunlight still shining on her, she shivered as she realized that, in a way, the demon truly had converted her. She would do anything to save Boann.
Deidre shook her head and tried to focus on the city before her. Her gaze fell from the sky to the Burnished District—the wealthy strip of city that ran between the sanctuary and the canyon’s edge. Here, Avel’s nobility and wealthiest citizens lived in grand villas filled with gardens, plazas, and towers topped with bright brass. The finest and tallest of these ran along the lip of the canyon, so the aristocracy could look down on the wide canyon floor and the city’s fields of wheat, lentils, and chickpeas.
To the south and west, the surrounding hills fell to meet the canyon floor and become continuous savanna. But where the canyon sides were high, Avel used them to keep out lycanthropes. A wide sandstone wall ran along the canyon’s mouth and protected the crops.
At the canyon’s other end, north of the sanctuary, stood the Dam of Canonist Cala—a massive, splendid barrier, composed of one unified piece of sandstone. It looked to have been grown rather than built. From her present angle, Deirdre could make out only the upper third of the structure. This far away, the rock appeared to vary gradually from pale tan near its lip down to a dusky red. Had she been closer, Deirdre would have seen in the stone a myriad of tiny striations, ranging from ash white to blood red.
“There is no other structure like it on this continent,” a soft voice said.
Deirdre turned to regard a tall woman whose eyes were striated with all the colors of sandstone: tawny, tan, white, dark gray. Though Deirdre had seen the canonist’s eyes before, they still shocked her. They were almost insectoid. The demigoddess’s solid features—large, shapely nose and wide lips—were proud, beautiful. What skin she exposed was deep reddish brown, visibly rough in texture.
Deirdre swallowed. Cala was half deity, half woman, brutally enslaved by Typhon. Often the demon would leave her frozen as a statue for days at a time.
Deirdre bowed. “My lady. It is an honor.”
Cala nodded. She wore loose garments of pale blue silk and a snowy white cowl. The thin cloth seemed more to accentuate than conceal the demigoddess’s statuesque body. Her strong shoulders tented above her folded arms. Her waist narrowed slightly before widening into the broad curves of her hips. The silk hung loose to her bare feet. But as the canonist stepped forward, her muscular thigh curved the cloth.
Deirdre cleared her throat. “Typhon wishes you to instruct me about the Silent Blight. I had hoped we might also discuss how I could better serve you and the city.”
For a long moment the canonist did not respond. She looked past Deirdre to the dam. “All the sandstone found in Western Spires is porous,” she said at last. “It would seem an obvious question, but few people ever ask why I use a porous rock to hold back water.”
Deirdre paused. Uncertain if this was supposed to have a second meaning. “Canonist, why do you use porous rock?”
The demigoddess did not seem to hear Deirdre. “There are roughly forty thousand souls living in my city. All yield some of their strength to me to keep the dam and the walls standing. I’d feel more comfortable with thirty five thousand subjects, fewer mouths to feed. But times are rich. The plague and the flux have stayed away, helped by shipments of hydromancer medicine from Ixos. More important, the rains have come every year for nearly a score. No wars have pulled away our young men and returned them crippled or suffering from venereal disease. Two banking houses from Queensport have built offices in the Cypress District. It’s been hard to stop the artisans, the singers, the prostitutes who are just barely eating in Dar or Queensport from emigrating down here. Droughts and lycanthropes be damned.”
Deirdre pursed her lips, confused. What was the canonist trying to tell her?
Cala continued: “It’s been like this before. The decades before the Civil War, brilliant years. Even the Canic peoples were well fed. So much life, like water building up behind a dam. At times I wondered if anything other than war was possible. When Celeste flew her armada over from Kara, there was a brief sky battle. Some tried to call it a siege, but it was nothing like the campaigns in the East. Still, it was horrifying: airships clashing, pilots leaping from slashed rigs, warkites circling like sharks, cutting stray pilots to rags before they reached ground.”
The demigoddess looked at Deirdre. “The bodies fell on the city or in the savanna. Celeste had planted insurgents in the Palm District and in North Gate. When the fighting broke out, the lycanthropes knocked holes in our outer walls. The wolves filled the Water District, the Palm District, the North Gate District. Still, we could have fought Celeste. We could have rebuffed her. It would have bled us both, and Avel would have remained a free city. But I chose not to bleed the realm. Only when I submitted to Celeste did the pores in the outer walls close.”
Deirdre stiffened. She had hoped to reach out to Cala, to offer alliance against Typhon. Perhaps that would not be wise. “My lady,” she said, “you are drawing a connection from your porous sandstone to your city, but I’m afraid … I’m afraid I don’t understand your subtle meaning.”
The demigoddess shook her head. “There is no subtlety, only history. Back then I was two beings, a secular queen named Miranda and a freely expressed goddess named Cala. But under Celeste’s monotheism, I had to become one canonist—Cala bound within Miranda. We’re one woman now, more Cala than Miranda I suppose, horrible for us both.” She looked down at her body. “My present cell. Imprisonment is sometimes necessary.”
Deirdre resisted the urge to bite her lip. “Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.”
The canonist smiled tightly. “It already has been. After the Civil War, Avel was reduced to a textual colony, committed to shipping the majority of our wind garden’s language away to be used by Celeste.” She paused. “But now we have well-guarded caravans filled with grain and silk rolling down from Dar. The Queen’s fleet built Coldlock Harbor to ship our sailcloth out, but now we can haul wagons of dried salmon over the Auburn Mountains and through North Gate. Now, more so than under the polytheism, there is enough food.”
“But there is more to life than survival,” Deirdre said carefully. “Typhon has promised that we, as his captains, will help bring in a new age.”
Cala looked to her dam. “Some have compared my dam to Richard’s Wall in the Lornish uplands. It is not a fair comparison. Richard’s Wall is simply a barrier that keeps the timber lycanthropes in the Tulgety Forest. Really no different from our city walls.”
The demigoddess adjusted her cowl. “Whereas my dam is not a just barrier, but also an aquifer. With