Author's Preface
Umin clears the board, leaving a clatter of soiled plates. He then bathes. The warm, lemon-sweet water blackening in the basin as he assiduously scrapes days of chalky filth from his skin.
Moving on to rifle through a pungent red cedar wardrobe. Emerging shrouded in subdued elegant enfoldings, befitting of a lesser courtier of the Lower Courts . Sweeping silken and long pleats.
He pauses before a tall, polished silver looking-glass, admiring for a moment before the ragged apparition of Thimblebrom rises like an admonishing spirit from out the dark closet of his conscience.
Frowning inwardly, he sweeps out the door and into an unfamiliar hall of mahogany whorls and a stretching row of faceless, smooth-stone sculptures. Each of a pair somehow ferally carnal in their inhumanly elongated and impossible embrace.
How fine your grace...
Come.
Here leans Pyna, against an opposing door-frame in her ever distempering rag-doll fashion.
Swiftly animate once more as Umin issues out into the gallery. And immediately slipping ahead, listlessly trailing fingers across statuary.
They are wheat.
Thresh and thresh.
Oh how they
Fear their own
Flesh.
After a few more turns Umin begins to recognize the occasional chamber or vestibule.
They step into a dim pantry, cluttered with crockery and shapeless sack-cloth.
Along the flank here, Pyna unhinges a concealing panel which opens into a fearfully narrow lane abreast the Inn .
This way too, is well guarded by perilous shapes in sistering alcoves. Crouching, standing. Whispering and wary.
Umin peers up, like one searching for a way-star across the stretching canopy of Old Night, but here there is only vaulty black broken at the edges by the ambivalent glow that leers from the ever lumbering Gate of Candles .