[b]Sarnath, Kingdom of Poertia[/b]

"That was bloody work." Sadaf said, helping Javid out of his armor.

Wrought iron lamps in the shapes of fruits and flowers hung from the pavilion poles, inside oil and incense burned to create a fragrant smoke and a dull yellow glow. The pavilion's cloth was a soft red velvet embellished with images of lions chasing gazelle across fields of lotus and papyrus.

"The Gods decide these things." Javid replied. Once the heavy fish-scale mail was pulled away, he was dressed to the neck in padded wool. During a summer on in the valleys, so much armor could get sweaty and uncomfortable, but it was a blessing in the mountains. Cold winds blew in from the north, and they raced across the higher places were there were fewer trees or cliffs to break them.

Sadaf was Javid's squire, and his bastard nephew. His father's spiritual quest kept him away from his natural son, so it had fell to Javid to teach his nephew the skills he would need to be a man of noble birth. Sadaf was fifteen, a young man with a wispy ghost of a mustache on his upper lift and a thick tangle of hair growing to his shoulders. He wore a pale blue tunic, and a leather jerkin that he seemed to think made him a warrior.

"I know." Sadaf replied. "I don't know how it could be any different, but its... its not like battle."

"Its a holy honor." Javid said. "But not a dignified one." Every warrior who brought sacrifices to the Gul Shapur harbored some doubts. His own he had dismissed long ago as the effect of his grandmothers blasphemies. She had held true to the Gods of old, and she tried to turn her kin against the Gul's. Demons. That is what she called them. As much as she tried, it never worked.

The Hurut of those days had been fickled nomads, more likely to bicker with each other over old grievances than to act in common cause. Even the Visha, the Jinn of the mountain caves, had failed to bring unity to these lands. It was Shapur and his Gulish children who gave them direction. They raided, conquered, and grew rich in the name of these new lords. Was it better to spill the blood of your brothers than to feed the blood of your enemies to the Gods? These were weak thoughts.

Still, part of him feared the Guls now. He was in their presence, and they had invited him to their ball. An honor bestowed because he had brought human sacrifices rather than the fruit, animal-meat, and coin that less successful men delivered.

He had secured his invitation in a raid that had been more fruitful than could be anticipated. The neighboring Tupavu people were not subject to the Gul Shapur, and their villages were always poorly defended, but they had grown used to raids. Javid had expected to catch maybe a few elderly or sick prisoners, but instead he had found them unprepared. A religious festival of their own had blunted their wits. When Javid and his men arrived, they found that entire families had been left behind by the few who received the news to flee.

That had not been all of it. A few neighboring villages had gotten it into their minds that heroics could save their fellows. They organized a ramshackle militia only to allow themselves to be caught in a night attack that Javid still felt proud of. It had been a pincer movement, sweeping in from two directions so that the Tupavu farmer-militia simple surrendered right there without a fight. Not one of his men had been lost, and they had been able to bring twenty prisoners to sacrifice to the Gul Shapur.

That had been how he bought his invitation. He put on a deep blue, patterned kaftan robe with roaring lions embroidered into the fringes. A polished wooden circlet sat on top of his head, and kept a curved steel dagger sheathed in his belt. "Can I join the festival tonight?" Sadaf asked respectfully. 

Javid smiled. "Do not start any fights unless you can win them." he said. "I do not want to bring a dead boy home."

He left his Pavilion as the camps began their own version of the Grand Ball. Singing filled the air, joined by the sharp plucking sounds of setars as they played songs about war, and drinking, and heroes, and sex. As he walked, he passed by different smells. There were the succulent, juicy scents of goats and birds roasting over cookfires, and the ugly, acrid smell of men and women smoking hemp. Incense burned in some places, smelling like burning flowers. In other places the smell was the fires themselves, where men tossed damp green leaves into raging bonfires so that thick, black smoke filled the air.

He passed through the laughter, and the drunken storytelling as leisurely as a walk in the garden. He knew he was more comfortable here than he would be in the palace of the Gul's, and he drank in every moment. When he ran across two boys fighting with sticks, he jeered at them to land harder blows until one started to push the other back and they disappeared into the chaos of tents. At another place, he passed an old man passionately kissing a young woman on the neck. Her dress had been pulled down so that her breasts spilled out. The old man's face was buried in her skin, so that when Javid winked at her, he did not notice. She smiled slyly and watched him as he passed by.

Sooner than he would like, he was standing at the foot of the long stone stair case that led to the doors of Sarnath's great Vishput castle. There was still wet blood in the gutters, where it had ran down during the sacrifices. That had been a bloody business, he had to admit, but the glory that came from delivering so much to the Gul Shapur made up for the ugliness of the affair. 

Torchfires burned brightly in the upper windows and slits of the great castle, and golden light poured from them into the night. Otherwise, the castle was strangely quiet. He knew that the Sacrificial Ball was already in full swing, and that once inside the sounds of the revelry would fill the room, but the mountain walls of the castle were so thick that it kept any sound from leaving its outer doors.

How effective that must be for the Guls. Their castle stood tall and ominous over the land surrounding it, and anything that happened inside its walls stayed inside. Two twisted Vultures guarded the stairs, hideous gorgon faces on their breasts. In the dark, with nothing but torchlight to reveal them, they looked evil. Where these doubts the product of pious old goats like his grandmother, and their bleatings about what went on in this castle?

He passed by the guards. Golden wings sprung upward from their golden helmets. Their visors were masks with tight lipped visages, cold and uncaring. They stood as still as statues, and wielded long golden halberds with blades shaped like a feathered wing. These men were impressively armed and armored, looking as beautiful as they were powerful, but Javid knew their weapons were impractical. It was the swords they wore at their hips that would truly decide a fight. 

The stones of the halls were carved in ancient reliefs from the time of the Vishput. Three eyed men stood commanding and regal in otherworldly scenes of forgotten machines and towering landscapes. Visha art always seemed to convey a sense of enormity that the work of modern peoples of the world never reached. They had been gone for hundreds of years, but no King nor Raj had ever reached their immensity.

The thick-walled halls wormed through stone as if this were the entrance to a labyrinth. Javid wondered how many of the carved reliefs in the walls hid arrow slits or murder holes to harry an invader. This had been a fortress outpost in the days of the Jinn, to defend against the nomads of the northern deserts. War explained many of its designs.

When the labyrinth gate finally spilled him into the main hall, he was awestruck at what he saw. It was one open space, so immense that it could have swallowed a smaller mountain. The scanty village that clung to the rocky fields outside of the castle could have fit inside multiple times. The Sacrificial Ball was focused in the center, around a shallow pool of crystal-blue water. There were not near enough people to even start filling the halls however, so the crowd grew sparse further from the center. Only guards stood in the cold, dark edges. 

The ceiling rose like a bell, for stories and stories until it reached into unseen blackness. Balconies and doorways opened as far up as Javid could see, telling of more rooms and halls than the Gul Shapur could possibly make use of. The walls were decorated with cold grey reliefs, who's details could only be made out at the lower levels. At the higher levels, the reliefs gave the walls a look of fractal intricacy.

At the far end of the hall, a the statue of a mighty Jinn rose tall and proud. It held a Falchion in one hand, and its other was raised in a meditative salute. Though a long stone beard still fell across its chest, most of the head had been removed. From down here it was hard to see, but he knew that the Gul Shapur kept one of their thrones in the ruined neck of the statue. 

He began to descend down the expanding staircase, music and the long echo of one hundred conversations growing louder as he approached.