Before him loomed a curtain of charred flesh. Iblees had never presented himself to the young king as anything but a whisper—a force transmittable from anywhere—and yet, too often Cyrus was summoned here. Here, the scene of every great missive and every great castigation, this decomposing suite of rooms separated only by patchwork veils of scorched human skin, was the devil’s preferred place of communication. It was, in Cyrus’s approximation, a parallel to purgatory.
