Annan had visited the Rikaner Kingdom's imitation Little Mountain-Ring Palace Gardens. Its splendor might have stunned plenty of people, but Annan had seen too many wonders to be particularly impressed.
The Empire's Mountain-Ring Palace Gardens, though, truly made him feel as if he had stepped into a Divine Kingdom.
Rings of gray marble floated in the air as though weightless, disappearing into the clouds and mist. Deer moved through the lush gardens, and now and then a gleaming statue appeared beside the paths.
The Mountain-Ring Palace Gardens were neither as rustic as the Elf Forest nor as crowded with man-made structures as human City-States. They blended the two, giving Annan a sense of Elven style—not that this was surprising.
The Mountain-Ring Palace Gardens had been built in the Early Saint Laurent Calendar, when humans were still heavily influenced by Elven aesthetics.
What surprised Annan was that he had expected the Empire's Holy Land to look much like the rest of it: Head-Mounds everywhere, headless corpses impaled on stakes, heads boiling in Cooking Pots, blood and bone treated as beauty...
Instead, even the carvings on the marble columns depicted Elk and scenes of nature.
They entered the Palace, where more than a dozen enormous stone columns stood outside the portico. Olin told Annan to stay there while she pushed Old Ancestor farther in.
With nothing to do, Annan surveyed the empty Palace—not even a guard in sight—and started playing a game of "find the Head-Mound."
Close as Annan was to Old Ancestor, he knew little about the emperor's views.
That was only natural. The Empire was so vast that when Montreal Mountain, its brain, issued an order, its hands and feet at the farthest reaches might not respond for ten days or half a month.
He circled the Palace, and as