Chapter Fifteen
Volgatis, Divinus Prime.
Even after years of discord and violence, Volgatis was unsullied by by war. Only the most desperate of souls would brave the wrath of its protectors. As Livia rode around the final bend of the treacherous mountain path, she rained in her horse, giving Dharmia a chance to admire the magnificence of the holy fortress. The convent knifed up from a spur of the mountain, hung over a sheer drop, thousands of feet high. The bottom of the chasm was hidden beneath the clouds that drifted far below. The gleaming white talon soared up out of sight, but also plunged down into the mountainside, its myriad lights glittering in the dark like seams of gold. It looked like an ice blade thrust into the mountain by a god.
Dharmia looked back down the moonlit path and saw the others riding up towards them. The men were all swaying in their saddles, exhausted by the furious ride and coated in a glittering layer of frost.
"Will they just let us in?" Dharmia asked, pounding her frozen arms, trying to recover some feeling in her limbs. She looked up at the pinpricks of light that covered the tower. "Do Seraphim like unexpected guests?"
"They are Children of they Vow, just like we are," replied Livia. "Besides," she said, nodding down the mountainside, "they will be glad of the extra guns." Livia was wearing her usual, sardonic smile, but Dharmia noticed it was not quite as convincing as normal.
Dharmia looked where she was pointing and saw the long, coiling snake of lights that lay across the plains. Pieter Zorambus was less than a day behind them and his army had grown even larger as he marched towards Volgatis. The new converts inspired by the miracle of Hesbon's wings. Dharmia guessed that the apostates now numbered several thousand.
Livia clicked the horse into motion and they crunched across the ice towards the gates of the fortress. The doors were hundreds of feet tall and the final approach was covered by an enormous portico. Rather than columns the vast porch was supported by four colossal statues, each of them kneeling, heads bowed, with the gabled roof of the portico in their huge hands. "The seraphim will have heard of our losses," said Livia as they rode into the shadow beneath the porch, "and our refusal to join with the Unbegotten Prince. They will not question our loyalty. They will know what we have endured to honour the Vow, so it would not occur to them that we might wish to remove the blade."
The gates were closed. They reached up into the night sky like another limb of the mountain, blocking out the stars as Dharmia and Livia rode towards them.
"We bring our faith and our guns!" cried Livia, rising up in her saddle as the others rode up behind them, gathering before the gates. "We are Children of the Vow and we have come to preserve that which must be preserved."
Her words echoed strangely around the gully and there was no reply.
