Nakor kept his eyes down as he had been instructed since they had first arrived in the Dasati realm. He glanced up occasionally to make sure he didn’t lose track of his ‘masters’, Martuch and Hirea. Also, he made careful note of how this part of the Great Palace was laid out. The structure was massive. In a city on a scale that dwarfed any human construction he had seen, this palace was the crowning achievement in excess. It had taken the three companions less than an hour to reach the entrance from where they had hidden in the Grove of Delmat-Ama, but from there it had been almost a half day’s ride along the streets that were within the precincts of the palace, and so far they had reached only the outer warrens. Sundown was less than an hour away. As for as they were able, the two Dasati warriors gave Nakor a narrative about this monstrous construction.
The Great Palace, home of the ruler of the Dasati Empire, occupied more space than the entire city of Kentosani on the Tsurani home world of Kelewan, and that city contained over a million people within its walls. More than two million Dasati lived within the palace precincts, five million in the central capital city. Nakor realized that the estimates of how many Deathknights the TeKarana could order into the field to invade the first realm was vastly understated. Macros had said two million Deathknights, but Nakor was convinced he was not thinking of the Dark One stripping every Dasati warrior from The Twelve Words and unleashing them… Something wasn’t right. Once they established a bridgehead into the first realm, either on Kelewan or Midkemia or some other world, vast numbers of worlds would be in peril. But even for this god, that was a brutish and simple plan.
The wily gambler weighed every piece of evidence that he could discern, either through direct observation or from what others had said, either to him or what he had overheard when they didn’t realize he was listening. He now came to an inescapable conclusion: the Dasati could not be defeated by the armies of every nation on Midkemia and Kelewan combined. At best they could be delayed. And at worst, they would sweep aside all opposition as if they were fighting children with play weapons.
Nakor resolved that whatever Pug found out about the history of this world, whatever revelations were discovered when he found the leaders of the Bloodwitch Sisterhood, no matter what the true nature of Macros – and he had serious doubts he was as he seemed to be – whatever any of them discovered, there was going to be but one solution to the coming crisis: the destruction of the Dark God.
As he considered this conclusion, Nakor weighed all the Dark One’s actions in the past and something began to emerge, a sense of the true purpose behind the apparent mindless killing and destruction. There was a plan at work, a pattern of things unfolding, and he was tantalized by almost understanding what it was.
The deeper into the palace they travelled the more certain Nakor became that something profoundly evil existed at the heart of this society. Their art – what there was of it – was nothing more than a twisted celebration of their dark faith. He had been struck since entering the second realm that he had seen nothing that resembled decoration or art, except on the Dasati themselves. They had some expression of beauty – once you adjusted to their appearances, they were a very handsome race he decided – but there were no paintings or tapestries hanging on walls, no variation in colour in buildings or signs. Some of this he was convinced was due to them having a very different colour sense to humans – they could see below red and beyond violet, like certain creatures in the first realm, and they could see heat, which made them lethally dangerous fighters at night.
But it wasn’t until they were inside the palace that Nakor saw anything like fine art, and here it was in the form of ghastly murals, showing murder, torture, execution and slaughter in praise of the Dark God. If there was a narrative aspect to the murals, Nakor couldn’t discern it, but he did intuit that this particular section had to do with some grand conquest in ages past.