Mortal Danger

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The audience hall was vast, hot, and noisy, an echoing oven of a space hollowed out of the remains of an ancient volcano. Gan scurried across the stony floor as fast as its stubby legs would carry it, watching out for shadows. Sometimes the crevices shifted. What looked like a shadow one day might, on the next, send you plummeting. Or make you look foolish, which was almost as bad.

There was no roof. The walls climbed jaggedly up and up to the exposed sky at the rim of the caldera, black and empty. Gan’s skin crawled at all that overhead emptiness, though it knew Xitil’s pets wouldn’t bother it. Not this time.

Courtiers of every ilk fought or chatted among the carved columns thrusting up from the floor—here a fourteen-foot granite phallus, there a set of gaping onyx jaws big enough to swallow an ox.

Not that half these idiots knew what an ox was, Gan thought with a sniff as it rounded a set of rosy labia formed from quartz. Gan did, though. It might be young, it might be small, but it knew more about the human realm than any of them.

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