We sailed towards the city, whose towers shimmered in an iridescent haze, and soon the lower portions of the metropolis came into view. The city had been built against the slope of a darkly formed mountain, and the dockyard and lower streets – evidently the oldest parts of the city, for they were formed of cyclopean structures of incalculable age – were laid out in irregularly patterned streets and alleys.
This was in stark contrast to the neat divisions of the upper avenues, and as the city continued up the towering mountain whose shadow-veiled slopes disappeared dizzingly into the clouds, the architecture took on ever newer and bizarrely alien forms – domes, and curved peaks, parapets with flat circles set above, all balancing impossibly on razor-thin edges.
The ship entered port and I noted, once again, the same fragrant odour of certain embalming chemicals I had detected earlier in my laboratory. What I had thought as some manner of perfume or cologne used by the masked men now seemed to lay over the city as a blanket of creeping miasma.
I saw scores of masked slaves working on the piers, or on levee-protected fields along the coast, and grimly concluded that this grotesque civilization was built and sustained solely upon their labour.
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As we prepared to disembark, a lone crier emerged onto the deck of the black galleon, and loosed a trio of deafening blasts from an oddly shaped cornet to announce our arrival. Only moments later a return note was heard from a nearby alabaster tower, which our crier met with another series of odd musical tones. The alabaster tower then signalled one final time, and a bell was tolled, whose haunting chime echoed throughout the dark cyclopean streets and up to the highest sun-bleached terrace.
The wooden crate containing my laboratory was offloaded and hauled away by a group of mute slaves, while the Priestess and her two assistants each carefully cradled one of my prepared teas of the tongue of the dead. They proceeded into the city, a dozen masked men at their backs, and I was made to follow them.
We took a curiously indirect route through the labyrinthine alleys of the old district, for the streets curved strangely or ended abruptly in a manner that no sane architect could design.
Then we came to the main artery of the upper city, and there was a great hubbub on the cobblestone streets, and I saw a large number of people, many of them similarly obscenely tattooed and pierced as the clergy, although lacking their emblems and tokens. We joined the crowd and moved steadily towards a large domed building in the centre of a square, and I marvelled at the complex yet delicate architecture of the city’s sanguine gardens and steepled dwellings.
