Vohanna’s sanctum was lined with niches in which bodies stood. There were dozens of the still forms, behind glass panels in rectangular recesses within the sphere’s ebon walls. Human and inhuman waited there, the mythical and the extinct standing next to the common. Some of the bodies seemed more machine than flesh; others mimicked the cephalopod or the arachnid.
As strange as was that parliament of bodies, however, it was Vohanna who held the stage. I had time to see her here, as I had not that night in the temple at Kellet’s Bay or in the arena below where I’d fought Bryce. She hovered above the floor, over a table of scintillant gold. Her four lower limbs were thin as sticks and seemingly useless. It was her wings that held her, and they were not feathered like those of birds, not memb
