"Who's Jacowicz?" Paul asked.
"He's the elder in charge of obedience. Brill's right-hand man, and maybe even more dangerous. He's the one who set up the Sons of God." Selmer lowered himself carefully to another benchlike outcropping of rock. "Jacowicz is determined to get each of us on his God Wall."
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"You need help," Paul said. "That's obvious. But you should ask UNSA for it. I don't see how you can expect Dorland to go into that temple alone."
"We've got it all worked out. There shouldn't be any problem—"
"Is that what you thought when Cleve Quinton went in?" Paul asked. "If Dorland has to fight for his life, he won't have a chance. Dorland hates violence. Sabastian should know that."
"He does," Selmer said. "After all, Dorland's his nephew. If everything goes as planned, there won't be any violence."
"If everything goes as planned," Paul said bitterly. "All you're betting is Dorland's life."
"We're betting all our lives." Selmer held out a pair of binoculars. "Here, you can see better with these."
"I can see all I want to."
"I'd like to show you something." Paul grudgingly accepted the binoculars and looked through them at the city. Light slanted across the valley from the setting sun. Although most of the ruins were hidden by vegetation, he could see that the patches of pale pink were the remains of domed structures. Some were still nearly whole, thrusting up through the vegetation like the top halves of pink skulls. He lifted the binoculars and focused them on the village of Fairhope—a rambling collection of small, square buildings and narrow roads, canopied by a blue haze of woodsmoke. The river snaked along one side of it. Small figures moved around. Narrow roads led between the fields toward Chalcharuzzi. He found the zoom control and expanded the
image of one of the buildings. A cabin, he realized, made of cut logs. A thin spiral of smoke rose from the chimney.
"On the far right you can see the temple," Selmer said. "That's the building with the white spire."
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Paul searched until he found it: a squat, reddishbrown building dominated by a single white spire that curved up fifty meters or more to catch the last rays of the sun. A few smaller buildings were scattered behind it. A wall surrounded the entire complex.
"Look there in the back, where the wall has been built up higher."
Paul found the place Selmer was talking about. The wall was uniformly low around most of the temple complex, certainly no higher than a man's shoulders. But on the far side was a section that was raised above the rest. The heightened section ran only ten meters or so, and from what Paul could see there was no structural reason for it. He adjusted the focus control of the glasses. There was something on the raised section of wall. A dark smudge . . .
Then the smudge jumped into focus, and Paul's blood ran cold. Three bodies hung side by side on the wall, several feet above the ground. Their arms were outstretched as if their wrists had been fastened to the wall, and their feet were bound together. Their heads lolled.
"That's the God Wall," Ogram said. Paul couldn't take his eyes from the limp bodies. He saw no movement. "Are they dead?"
"Probably. Karyn said they were strung up three days ago. That means three days without food or water, with Jacowicz coming out from time to time to question them." Ogram placed a slight, bitter emphasis on the word question. "I'm sure they're dead by now."
"Who were they?"
"We don't know. They were probably found guilty of being heretics. Translated, that means they were accused of helping us."
"Were they?"
"No. We have a lot of friends in Fairhope. Some William Greenleaf
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of us even have family there. But we don't let them give us any help. Too dangerous for them."
"Why would Brill put them on the wall?"
"To make a point. He must have found out I followed Deacon Bekman when he went after
Dorland. High Elder Brill didn't like that, so he did this to make sure we understand."
Paul lowered the binoculars and stared at Selmer incredulously. "He would do that to people who aren't even connected with your group . . . just to make a point?"
Selmer nodded. "This isn't the first time. He wants to pressure us into turning ourselves in." Paul lifted the binoculars again and saw something along the bottom of the wall that he at first took to be light-colored vegetation. He focused the binoculars and realized they were piles of bones that had fallen from the wall and collected on the ground. He shuddered and turned the binoculars back to the temple. The area around it had been cleared of rubble and vegetation, and landscaped with a flat lawn, graceful trees and clumps of flowering shrubs. That alone made the temple grounds stand out, but even more conspicuous was the white spire. Selmer shrugged when Paul asked him about it.
"It's original. The Tal Tahir used the spire in a lot of their architecture."
"A symbol?"
Selmer shrugged again. "I don't know. I've heard that the Holy Order had the others torn down a long time ago. They left that one as a landmark for their Godsday services."
The smaller buildings clustered behind the temple were of obviously human design. Compared with the primitive look of Fairhope and the crumbled ruins around it, the temple complex had a sound, well-maintained look. Walkways connected the buildings to the temple and to one another.
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"The deacons live down there?" Paul asked.
"Yeah. High Elder Brill lives in that first building just behind the temple. Hit the zoom—you may be lucky enough to see him on the porch. He likes to sit out there and lord over his flock." Paul touched the control and the image expanded until he could clearly see the building Selmer meant. It was sturdy, made of sawed planks, from the look of it. In the front was a wide, covered porch bordered by hedges and flower beds. A paved walkway led up to it. A white-robed sentry stood on each side of the set of dark-stained doors. As Paul watched, a man emerged from the door and stopped to speak to one of the sentries. He, too, wore a white robe, but this one was trimmed in scarlet. Paul described the man.
"That's Elder Jacowicz," Selmer said. "He spends a lot of time with the High Elder." Jacowicz was scarecrow-thin. His eyes were lost in the shadow cast by the porch's roof, but the rest of his face was clear—long, thin nose, high cheekbones, straight slash of a mouth. He stepped down from the porch, then made his way slowly along the walkway to another building farther back. After he had gone inside, Paul turned the binoculars to the temple again. Beyond it was a large area where the vegetation was thinner, and Paul could see more of the domed structures. He studied several of them. The Tal Tahir obviously hadn't gone in for elaborate architecture. What he could see of the city was boringly monotonous. Then he realized he was seeing something he hadn't noticed before. He took the binoculars away for an overall view.
"It's laid out in a pattern," he said.
"What?" Selmer's thoughts had been elsewhere.
"Oh—you mean the circles."
The basis for the city's design seemed to be the tubeways. Many had fallen, but enough remained 82 William Greenleaf
for Paul to see that they had been laid out in straight lines to form a grid across the city. He counted seven tubes running in each direction, spaced about two kilometers apart. Each square formed by the intersecting tubes was divided into quarter sections. A circular pattern of domed structures occupied each quadrant, and in the center of each circle was a large space given over to vegetation. Presumably, the domed structures had been the primary dwelling buildings of the Tal Tahir. By moving the binoculars across the areas that were relatively free of vegetation, Paul made a rough count of about a hundred domes in each outer circle, and that many more in the two inner circles. He calculated the rest in his head: say two hundred domes per quadrant, making eight hundred in a square, times thirty-six squares came to ... close to twenty-nine thousand domes in the city. A lot more than he would have guessed.