Free Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) by Juliet E. McKenna Page A

rain.
    Gasping, she thrust out a hand and welcomed the cold shock of the temple’s marble wall, luminous in the moonlight. Her affinity drew her backwards through the rock’s aeons-old existence. She felt the ring of the mason’s chisels and then the shuddering crack as the block was prized from the quarries in the hills above Feverad in distant Tormalin. The tremors faded, soothed by the calm of countless undisturbed generations until she felt the warmth of the rising fires deep beneath the earth which had transformed the once humble limestone into this radiant marble.
    Jilseth opened her eyes and smoothed her skirts. Shivering, she realised that she’d left her cloak on the chair in Kerrit’s kitchen. There was nothing to be done about that beyond summoning up a breath of elemental fire to ward off the cold sea breeze. She took a cautious step forward and looked to either side.
    The harbour-side path separating the temple from the low wall lapped by the gulf’s dark waters was deserted. Jilseth made her way cautiously along this windowless face of the mighty temple. The uproar from the crowds in the vast square on the inland side grew louder.
    As she turned the corner and walked to the front of the temple, she contemplated the unruly celebrations swirling around the two great fountains in the centre of the flagstoned expanse. Silk-clad Relshazri bedecked with jewels mingled unconcerned with the city’s ragged and filthy, bottles and flagons passed from hand to hand.
    Snatches of music rose above the tumult. Jilseth picked out several huddles of pipers and viol players around the fringes of the crowd. In the open space between the fountains and the temple, jugglers tossed rainbow knots of tasselled cords and glittering glass balls. Painted tumblers displayed their skills; girls flipping themselves from hands to feet and back again before their partners tossed them high onto a waiting strongman’s broad shoulders.
    Would-be worshippers waited quietly in long lines four and five abreast. Every few moments they advanced a little further up the steps towards the temple’s great double doors. Torches burned in brackets high on the white marble pillars supporting the pediment laden with statues of the gods and goddesses. The flames struck a golden sheen from the hammered bronze sheathing the recessed entrances all across the front of the temple.
    The hollow darkness within was guarded by priests and priestesses barring every one of those thresholds. No one entered without dropping some offering into the deep wooden bowls presented by these guardians.
    Jilseth recalled that her coin purse was in her cloak pocket in Kerrit’s kitchen and besides, it only held a few silver marks and pennies for Hadrumal’s wine- and cook-shops. Mainlanders in taverns claimed that Archmage Planir could pluck solid coin out of thin air but if that was truly one of his secrets, he’d never shared it with Jilseth. Drawing pure metal from ore-bearing rock was a slow process by wizardly standards and besides, she no more carried such ore around than she did gold coin.
    Would these supposedly pious men and women let her into the temple without paying their fee? She might be doing the Relshazri religious a disservice but Jilseth doubted it.
    Since she had embarked on her travels around the mainland at the Archmage’s request, Jilseth had met priests and priestesses as varied in character as any other selection of humanity. Among those nobles who so often inherited a shrine and its obligations with the rest of their holdings, she had encountered both the truly devout and the mindlessly sanctimonious. Among those who had chosen to swear their life away in the service of some unseen, unquantifiable deity, she had met both the calculatedly venal and those whose dedication was clearly rewarded in some intangible fashion far beyond the food and shelter bought by the alms given to their shrine.
    Master Resnada had said that time was of the essence.