They laughed.
The watch-horn sounded to the other two ships.
With the tide, they turned into the straits for Ankabek.
The three ships were seen at sunfall, sliding dark out of a coming night. There had for some while been awareness on the island of the goddess that eventually religious immunity might fail. A pattern of actions had been prepared. These were instigated.
The village at the landing was swiftly deserted. Other pockets of outlying humanity on the island were alerted by the flare of beacons along the rocky slope, ignited as the first fugitives passed on their way to the temple.
The Free Zakorians, as they hove nearer, saw these fireworks across the gathering dark, but flame, so often the emblem of catastrophe, only stimulated them.
The landing at Ankabek had not sufficient depth of water to accommodate their biremes. They anchored a mile from the coast therefore, and put out for the beach in relays of boats.
Long before they were fully landed, the live things of the island were all within the central temple precincts, men, women, children, and the animals of their sustenance.
The Free Zakorians scoured the village as a matter of course, and fired it, before pressing on up the slope.
The priestess Eraz, having dressed herself in her golden robes, walked the buried corridors toward the Sanctum. Years had passed since the aura of such robes had been thought needful. More than eight years. Yet they were as beautiful and as shining. Eraz herself looked no older than in that hour she had confronted in her gold the young soldier of the Prince Kesarh. Rem, who had been called Rarnammon, on whom the Dream of the goddess lay like a faintly perceptible light. At that hour he was the Messenger. The Message had required to be given surely. Not merely words and scenes, but in the coinage of Power. Eraz had possessed the Power to impart, and he the Power to receive.
The future of his body’s life continued now, along the lines of invisible brilliance, the roads of the planet’s own force. Her body’s life would end tonight. She was saddened, for she had learned to love her body, in the rightful way, and to love the form her soul had taken in this body. To imagine leaving her flesh and meeting again with her soul as it truly was, this was daunting, the reunion with a beloved stranger. But, that was only the fear of the unremembered thing. After death, memory returned. She would not fear, nor be a stranger to herself, then.
She ascended, and passed through the final unsealed door into the Sanctum. She was the last to enter. The door was immediately closed and barred behind her.
The gold curtain had not yet been lifted from before the goddess.
The rest of the room was not unduly crowded, though all were present. The men and women of the island, and of the temple. The novices, the acolytes, the priests and priestesses. And the beasts. Cows lowed, their feet covering the bodies of heroes in the mosaic floor. A pet rodent scampered, chased by a child, in and out, a game.
The waste also saddened her. But the souls of beasts and men could not die. There would be other lives for them in the world, or other worlds. Nothing was for nothing.
They looked at her, and she felt the strength of her aura touch, clasp, enfold them. They could not all know these things. Or could not all trust in them. She must hold them now, their mother, as Anackire held the earth, or the Principle, which they had named Anackire, held it. Eraz smiled a little. It was not hubris.
And outside, the Black Leopard raced toward them.
She had felt their aura, too, the Free Zakorians, a thundercloud. Death and agony of spirit, and lust for the agony of others.
Had she, Eraz, contained the Power of one such as Raldnor Rehdon’s son, had this room been filled by Lowlanders imbued by that Power, then, no doubt, they would not have been the victims. Yet the place where the hero had worked his magic—the earthquake, Koramvis’ fall—had been adjacent to the great Power-source of the hidden cave temple, known to the ancients of Eraz’s people, who had set there the colossal goddess statue. That charge, the vitality of Raldnor, combined—Ankabek was not a power-source, though the island lay over one of those lines of psychic power that ribbed the planet: The line that ran to Koramvis from the arcane kingdom of the Zor.
But no, she must not idle, musing on these occult mathematics. They had not the strength to stand against their enemies, either of body or psyche. That strength had been, and was to come.
As she raised her head, there was a terrible booming.
Women in the small crowd cried out. There was not one of them who did not know what the sound indicated. The Free Zakorians had reached the temple’s outer doors and had begun the process of breaking them in. Having some knowledge of Ankabek, they would have brought make-shift rams from their ships to do it.
Even so, the noise seemed far away.
Eraz began to speak.
“We are well defended,” she said. “The outer doors, when secured, are very hard to penetrate, though they will penetrate them. The Sanctum is enclosed, and it is unlikely any Zakorian may breach the stone’s mechanism, even by random accident.” She saw their faces, and understood she must not prolong their hope, which was groundless. “Yet,” she said, “they will also gain access to the precinct of the novitiates. Corridors descend there and run below the temple, connecting to stairs which lead between this chamber’s outer and inner walls. Here there are doorways only of metal, barred only by metal. Through such a doorway you saw me just now enter.” She waited a moment, her heart chilled at their faces, now. She said, “Others than they might abandon the central temple. The inner ways which lead to it are complex. They would not try them, might not even search for them. But these Free Zakorians are different. There is shame and death before them. They have, in turn, a madness to debase and to kill. By the desperation of this need, they will discover the way in to us. Hours may pass, but you will eventually hear them against these inner doors, which cannot forever keep them out.” Women wept. Children, catching fear, wept also. The beasts were troubled. There was anguish and horror. She must conclude. “We know the leniency of Free Zakoris. To their own kind they are merciless. For us they will have torture unspeakable. I shall describe none of it. Remember only what you know of them. They will leave none alive, but for many death will be slow. They will kill also your children in hideous ways, and your beasts. They will drink blood in the stolen wine. Then they will burn whatever is left.” She paused. She said, “The statue of Anackire they will hoist and drag and fling into the sea, though they will tear away her jewels and cut out her eyes, and rip away the curtain for loot. Such spoil will be vaunted in Zakoris-In-Thaddra. They will say they have slain one of Her lives.”
She waited then, once more, until, over the horrified weeping and moaning, the silence of despair came down like snow. And beyond the walls, all at once, she heard the outer doors give way. The sound was appalling. Even Eraz it appalled.
And even if she had not thought life stretched away beyond life for all of them, yet she could not have wished to live to hear that other splintering of the inner doors, which must come.
She looked out at them, and let the Power pass through her, and from her, and so into each of them.
“The soul never dies,” she said. “Death is not death. So the rituals of the goddess have taught us. Dying is only change. The flesh is left upon the ground. The spirit is born again out of the husk. And this She has taught us by her symbol and her image which is the snake, who, casting its skin, pours from the husk alive, that we may know we too shall live beyond a cast-off skin, alive and beautiful as the stars.”
She felt them now. Each mind a flame, held within the scope of hers. Their faces were empty of fear.