Hordrön, god-lord of the Woad, receives visitors in one configuration: on your knees, crawling backward through two hundred feet of warm-floored corridor, permitted under no circumstances to turn around. Van described what he saw when looking was finally permitted - a gelatinous figure on a stainless steel throne, face dripping and hissing where it struck the flagstones, burning a shallow bowl into the stone across uncounted years - with the flat puzzlement of a man making a note he isn't sure what to file under. Those who look upon him are told they will survive one forge cycle; I have not established the length of a forge cycle, but I note that no servant at the dunlockslyn temple has lasted more than twelve months. At the anniversary rites, the plumpest attendants are selected for the kitchens - he eats the best-bred milting and clowns, and refers to himself in the third person throughout. When Van and his companion drove toward the throne, Hordrön screamed, hurled curses, and fled through a trapdoor in the dais floor. I find this the most important detail about him.

Van's telling of the monthly rites of Hordrön is, he insists, accurate: the amphitheatre built into a pit below the plain, woad nobility seated above in their best jewels, prisoners handed steel and sent out to die in what the First Born call a sacred cleansing. His account of how he personally escaped, stormed the throne, and caused a living god to turn and run is delivered with a level of satisfaction I have learned not to question.

Two hundred feet of backward-crawling is the formal greeting — palms warm on the corridor floor, guards either side, eyes forward, never turning. Hordrön's face runs like forge-heated treacle and hisses where it drips to the flagstones, burning the stone beneath his throne into a shallow bowl across uncounted years; he refers to himself in the third person. Those who look upon him are sentenced to one forge cycle, which, going by the turnover at the Woad temple at dunlockslyn, appears to run no longer than twelve months.