Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

The soft flow of the words of the devotion, as she knelt in the warm shaft of sunlight, filled her with a profound calm, a serene sense of belonging unlike she ever had before. She whispered the words, letting them lift away the shards of pain. As she knelt, her head to the tiles, putting her heart and soul into saying the words, she felt free of any and every worry; she was suffused with the simple joy of life, and with reverence for it. As she chanted along with everyone else, she basked in the tender glow of the sunlight. It felt so warm, so protective. So loving.

It almost felt like Warren's loving embrace.

As she chanted along with everyone else, over and over, without pause but for breath, time slipped by, incidental, inconspicuous, unimportant within the core of calm she felt.

The bell rang out twice, a low, mellow, comforting affirmation that the devotion had ended, but at the same time would always be there with her.

Verna looked up when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Berdine smiling down at her. Verna looked around and saw that most of the people were already gone. She alone still bowed forward on her hands and knees on the floor before the pool. Berdine was kneeling beside her.

"Verna, are you all right?"

She straightened up on her knees. "Yes — it's just that it felt so good in the sunlight."

Berdine's brow twitched. She glanced over at the drops of rain dancing in the water of the pond.

"Verna, it has been raining the whole time."

Verna peered around as she stood. "But — I felt it. I saw the glow of the shaft of light all around me."

Berdine seemed to catch on, then, and put a comforting hand on the small of Verna's back. "I understand."

"You do?"

Berdine nodded with a compassionate smile. "Going to devotion in a way gives you a chance to consider your life and along with that it brings comfort in many forms. Maybe one who loves you came to comfort you."

Verna stared at the soft smile on the Mord-Sith's face. "Has that ever happened to you?"

Berdine swallowed as she nodded. Her eyes brimming with tears said that it had.

CHAPTER 31

They followed what seemed like a meandering, wandering, convoluted course through the People's Palace, not because they were lost or because they were taking their time and picking random routes as they came upon intersections of hallways, but because there was no straight route.

The complex, confusing passage through the labyrinth was necessary because the place had not been built to accommodate ease of travel through the palace, but, rather, it had been constructed in the explicit shape of a power spell that had been drawn on the face of the ground. Verna found it astonishing to consider that this was not only a spell-form similar to spells she herself had drawn, but that she was actually inside the elements that made up the spell. It was an entirely new perspective on conjuring and one on an imposing scale. Since the power spell for the House of Rahl was still active, she knew that the configuration of the foundation would probably have had to have been first drawn in blood — Rahl blood.

As the two of them walked down vast halls, Verna could not get over her astonishment at the utter beauty of the place, to say nothing of its size. She had seen grand places in the past, but the sheer magnitude of the People's Palace was staggering. It was less a palace and more of a city in the desolate Azrith Plains.

The palace atop the immense plateau was only a part of the vast complex. The interior of the plateau was honeycombed with thousands of rooms and passageways, and there were innumerable stairs taking different routes up through the chambers inside. A great number of people sold goods and services in the lower reaches of the plateau. It was a long and tiring climb up endless flights of stairs to reach the elaborate palace at the top, so many of the visitors who came to trade or make purchases did their business in those lower reaches, never taking the time to make it up all the way to the palace proper at the top. Even more people did business at open-air markets around the base of the plateau.

There was a single winding road, interrupted by a drawbridge, along the outside of the plateau. Even if it weren't heavily defended it would still be virtually impossible to attack the palace by that road. The interior of the plateau offered many more ways up-there were even ramps used by horsemen-but there were thousands of troops guarding the inside passages, and, if need be, there were colossal doors that could be closed, sealing off the plateau and the palace within.

Black stone statues standing to either side of a wide, white marble hallway watched Verna and Berdine as they made their way down the long hall. Torchlight glimmered off the polished black marble of the towering sentinels, making them almost seem alive. The contrasting color of stone, the black statuary in a white marble hall, added a sense of foreboding to the passage.