To Drown In Dreams (The Flight of the Lady Firene Book 2) by Amy Sanderson

Author:Amy Sanderson [Sanderson, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-10-22T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gilean. Try as I might, I couldn’t make that name summon up a single association or memory, which led me to the conclusion that I’d simply never heard it before. That was both plausible – because I wasn’t a native of Arjipur, after all – and not, if Shan was right and there really were a few of them in the city. Arjipur was a big place, but its people were a garrulous lot, and I couldn’t help thinking that something as intriguing as an ancient sect connected to gilgesh would have drawn a few whispers over the years, given the circles Daryus and I moved in.

I soon began to realise, though, why the Gileans weren’t a frequent topic of conversation. After a night spent in the cheapest and least unpleasant boarding house I could find, I spent a morning asking questions in tea houses and taverns and markets. Two themes quickly emerged, the first being that ‘Gilean’ was practically an insult, the order being associated in the public mind with sacrificial rites, cultish behaviour, and prophetic visions that might have been interesting if they weren’t so blatantly drug-addled. Secondly: the reason the Gileans weren’t discussed much was that, beyond the rumours everyone had heard a thousand times before, every real snippet of information about the sect was… quite boring.

I gleaned only one useful sliver of information, from an old man smoking gilgesh on a street corner, who heard my conversation with a stall-holder and decided to stick his oar in. There was a time, he told me, when the Gileans were more numerous in Arjipur, and in those days, they’d built a temple.

Where this temple might be, the man couldn’t tell me (although, with much head-shaking and muttering, he tried to make it look as if he actually didn’t want to discuss such sordid matters, no matter how sharply his eyes gleamed), but given that Arjipur had an entire district of temples, it was a start.

There were stories that Arjipur grew up around the oldest of its temples, though there was heated disagreement on just which the oldest might be. Sure enough, the temple district was in the city’s very heart, a ragged jumble of the glorious and the squalid on what had once been an island, but had now sunk even lower into the marsh than the rest of Arjipur. Most of the temples flooded entirely in monsoon season, and their acolytes spent the rest of the year bailing them out like leaking boats.

Not that that stopped anyone attending services or making prayers, and the temple district was always bustling. Arjipuris were considered a sacrilegious lot by most outsiders, because when they bothered to pray, it was to whichever god they brushed up against; why choose a single religion, after all, when you could spread your bets and follow them all? As it was a miracle the whole district hadn’t vanished into the canal yet, I couldn’t help thinking said worshippers had the right idea.

If there were Gileans to be found in Arjipur, then, the temple district seemed my best bet to find them.

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