CHAPTER 9I
In the quiet of the Innermost Circle, in Styphon’s House Upon Earth, at Balph, the great image looked down, and Sesklos, Supreme Priest and Styphon’s Voice, returned the carven stare almost as stonily. Sesklos did not believe in Styphon or in any other god; if he had, he would not be sitting here. The policies of Styphon’s House were too important to entrust to believers, and such could never hope to rise above the white robed outer circle, or at most don the black robes of underpriests. None might wear the yellow robe, let alone the flame-colored robe of primacy. The image, he knew, was of a man—the old highpriest who had, by discovering the application of a minor temple secret, taken the cult of a minor healer-god out of its mean back-street shrines and made it the power that
