"Who are they?" he asked the woman as he sat up and felt his body stretch with power cramped too long, as he squared back his shoulders and peered through the twilight in the court of monsters.
"Your worshippers, David Greaves," she said, standing beside him among the many arms of his couch. "The people whose last hope you are." She added softly: "My name, though you did not ask, is Adelie." She paused. "I, too, am one of your worshippers. Wherever there are human beings, throughout the Universe, you are worshipped."
He looked at her more closely. There was a lift to one black-winged eyebrow that was less reverent than a god might like, though a man could have no quarrel with it. She stood gracefully on sandaled feet, dressed in a single white garment girdled around her waist by a belt made of the same metal in which the monsters were cast. He saw that the clasp was shaped into a profile of his own face. And he saw from the wear that it showed that it was old—older than she could be, older perhaps than this court. This ... shrine? He wondered how many priestesses had worn that belt.
How many of his priestesses.
He frowned and got down, feeling the touch of the day-warmed stone on his bare feet. He was dressed, he saw, in a black kilt and nothing else. He returned his glance to the worshippers and saw that the men were dressed similarly, and that the women wore flowing, calf-length, translucently light robes like Adelie's.
There was motion at one corner of his eye, and he turned his head sharply to see the arms of the couch sweeping down, folding and bending against its sides. Now he saw that he had been cradled in the arms of a great black metal beast. It crouched atop the dais. Its head was bent supplicatingly, bright oily metal barely visible at the joinings of its mechanical body.
He glanced quickly up at the monsters atop their columns. "Are they all like that?" he asked Adelie.
An old man's gruff voice answered him from the other side of the beast-couch. "They won't spring down to devour you—you needn't be afraid of that." Two men came into view, one old, one young and very slim. The old one rapped the couch with his knuckles. "This tended you in your sleep. It is made in the shape of the most ferocious race that ever rivaled Man. It is now extinct—as are all those others up there, for the same reason."
The thin young man—very pale, very long of limb—stretched his broad, tight mouth into a smile that covered half his face without mirth. "Not the most ferocious, Vigil."
"Your kind will learn about that," the old man snapped.