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They rode out of Lalakash early the next morning, headed up the valley, through the dense, dripping forest, and into the hills. At least at first, Andras thought Lady Rada was making an effort to be nicer to him. She smiled a lot more, for one thing. She asked him questions about his childhood, and seemed especially interested in hearing about Atherton, the famous boarding school in the north of Myrcia, where most of the best families sent their children.
“Were you there at the same time as Princess Elwyn?” she asked.
“No, she left the year before I got there,” he said.
“But at least you’ve got something in common, and that’s nice.”
Her mood started to sour a little later, though, when they passed a ruined building, half hidden by the jungle, with its roof collapsed and tall banyan trees growing out of the middle. Andras reined in his horse and stared at it for a moment. The windows were arched, and there were buttresses at the side, and there was something familiar about the shape—like a bird with its wings extended.
“It’s a church,” he said. “What on earth is a church doing here?”
Rada frowned. “What do you mean? There are lots of old Trofast churches around here. Nearly the whole forest used to be part of Annenstruk, centuries ago. Didn’t you know that?”
“Are you serious?” He searched his memory, but the names and dates and maps from his schooldays were all a blur.
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Honestly.”
They passed other ruins after that on either side of the road—older ruins, apparently, stained and worn smooth by time. Mostly tumbled columns and bits of masonry, wrapped in vines and sticking up from the forest floor. Soon, though, there were larger structures—pediments and staircases to nowhere and empty doorways leaning at strange angles. There were slabs of broken pavement here and there, too. Finally, the road dropped into a wide, sheltered valley where the trees were thinner, and Andras saw an astonishing sight: huge temples of gray and black stone, covered in clinging shrubs and trees and rising like mountains over the woods.
As they drew closer, he could see statues covering the temples—human figures and animals and weird, repeating designs of swirling stone. Weed-choked causeways ran between the buildings, and half-fallen arcades surrounded sunken pools full of cattails and bright yellow iris. The sky was turning gray, which lent the temples a somber, ominous air. They looked abandoned, and more than that, it looked as if nothing good had happened to the people who had abandoned them.
“What is this place?” he asked Rada. His voice was a harsh whisper, and he fancied he could hear it echoing in darkened halls under the huge mountains of stone.
“This was Prasid Shahar,” she said. Her own voice was quiet, almost reverent. “It’s the capital of a lost nation. It was captured by the armies of Roshan long ago in the Kingdoms Era, and it fell into decay.” She frowned. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it.”
“Sorry, no.”
“Oh, for Finster’s sake,” she sighed. “What is it with you people? Would it kill you to learn a little about Sahasra Deva, the next tent over from yours?”
“The ‘next tent’?”
“Look, you went to Atherton, right? And you’re from Keneburg? Well, the Sahasran border is a lot closer to your hometown than Atherton is.” She threw up her hands. “I don’t understand it. I really don’t.”
He didn’t reply; he had a feeling anything he said would make it worse. She made a fair point, but she was taking this a bit more personally than she ought to.
A few minutes later, before they were even halfway through the dead city, it started raining. At first, they rode on, content simply to put up their hoods and endure it. But then the wind rose, and thunder crashed, and the rain came at them like a wall, making their horses stagger.
“We’d better stop for the night,” said Rada, and she pointed to one of the larger temple complexes a hundred yards away.
The ancient entrance hall was vast and dark, with moss and matted leaves on the floor, and wide cracks in the walls through which tree roots grew, like fingers trying to pry the massive building apart.
Andras hesitated on the threshold. “Are you sure this is safe? There aren’t snakes in here, are there?”
“There are snakes everywhere in the world. Don’t worry. They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”
He and Rada gathered moss and leaves and broken branches to make a fire. Andras took a long stick and used it to poke into all the piles of leaves before picking them up, just to be on the safe side. His older brother, Pedr, had read him a story about a pair of vengeful Sahasran cobras when they were kids, and he still remembered it vividly.
At last, they had a fire going, and they got out a kettle and a pot and drank some tea while they waited for their bacon and beans to cook. Andras sat back and took a better look around the entrance hall, now that the firelight made it possible to see details.
Statues glared down at him from every side, which was more than a little unnerving, at first. But then, picking up a burning branch for a torch, he went over and got a closer look at some of the carvings, and he couldn’t contain his laughter. They were figures of people having sex. Men with women, men with men, women with women. People with animal-headed gods and goddesses. And not just in normal positions or combinations, either. They were doing it frontwards, backwards, upside down, and sideways. They were doing it in wildly acrobatic poses requiring teams of assistants.
“Holy shit,” he giggled. “Would you look at this?”
Rada did, and in the firelight, he saw her face go pale as parchment, and then red as a radish in less than five seconds. “Oh, Earstien,” she said, putting up a hand to shield her eyes. “This was a temple of Urvara.”
“Who?” He snickered, pointing with his free hand at an impossibly curvy woman getting plowed by three men with donkey heads. “Is that her, right there?”
“Urvara is the Zraddhan goddess of fertility,” she said.
“So it seems,” he said, grinning. “Though apparently even getting pregnant doesn’t slow her down,” he added, pointing to the next frieze along the wall.
Rada turned on her heel and headed back to the cooking fire. “Come away from there. Don’t be vulgar.”
“I’m not being vulgar,” he said. “I’m trying to appreciate Sahasran culture.”
“It’s disgusting,” she snapped. He turned, and she waved a hand around the hall. “In the old days of Prasid Shahar, before its conquest by Roshan, temples like this had prostitutes. They were for the use of the men who came to worship. What do you think of that?”
“I think I would enjoy church a lot more if we had those kinds of services.”
“You’re disgusting,” she said, plopping down on the floor and giving the beans an angry stir.
“You bitch at me for not knowing anything about your country, and then I manage to find one aspect of your culture and religion that I like, and suddenly you turn all frigid and Ivich on me.”
She stirred the food a little more, then said softly, “I am Ivich.”
He walked a little way toward the fire. “You are? Did you convert or something?”
“No, I was born in Briddobad, but I was raised in the Raskolnik church. I was Affirmed at age 5.”
Now he came back and rejoined her. This called for some serious explanation. “What are you talking about?”
“My father is a Rathla noble. He was a diplomat, and he converted to marry my Loshadnarodski mother. She’s...well, I don’t like to mention it, but she’s a member of the royal family. I grew up in Loshadnarod.”
As she said it, he remembered hearing a story once about some Loshadnarodski princess, the younger sister of the queen, who had married a Sahasran man. Rada must be their daughter. “Was that hard for you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “And sometimes, yes.” She reached into the front of her tunic and pulled out a painted figure of a bird, hung on a silver chain, which she turned over in her fingers contemplatively. Andras had seen these little bird icons before, around the necks of captives. Back in the war, all the Loshadnarodski soldiers had worn them. They represented Earstien’s love, or his Light, or something, and they were connected somehow with the cult of the dead hillichmagnar, Daryna Olekovna.
“So how did you end up in Sahasra Deva?” he asked.
“I decided I couldn’t stay in Loshadnarod. And then Pallavi recruited me.”
“But why did you—?”
“I’d rather not go into it, thank you.” She looked up, smiling. “Oh, excellent. The beans are ready!”