Ilna understood the logic. As with much of what her companion did, she didn’t care for it.
“Do you suppose we’re in trouble for killing their God?” Alecto muttered. “That’s what it was, right?”
“I suppose it was,” Ilna agreed. “And I, at least, am in less trouble than I’d be if you hadn’t killed the thing.”
“Are you safe, great wizards?” Arthlan said in a quavering voice from the foot of the porch. He was wearing his diadem and robe of office.
“No thanks to you!” Ilna said. “You put us here to die, didn’t you?”
“No, no!” said a woman; the priest’s wife Oyra, Ilna thought, but it was hard to tell in the torchlight. Her vision was blurring occasionally besides, probably as an aftereffect of the salamander’s third eye or its poisonous breath. She hoped the problem was temporary.
“Mistress wizard,” Arthlan said, spreading his hands before him, “we couldn’t trouble God, do you see? For many generations He was content with an occasional goat or the cony we smoke out of their lairs. But recently…”
“He took my baby ten months back,” called a young woman. She held a torch, and her tears glittered in its light. “Came into the hut and tipped him out of his cradle. We were getting ready to name him the very next day, and he was gone!”
“And my wife!” said another man. He’d carried an axe when Ilna and Alecto arrived in the village, but he held only a rushlight now. “I woke up when our daughter screamed, but God already had her by the leg. All we could do was watch.”
“What do you mean, all you could do was watch?” Alecto snarled. She stood with her arms down but a little out from her sides. The muscles of her legs and bare torso were corded with tension. “You could’ve took its head off with your axe, couldn’t you?”
“Couldn’t you have blocked the cave?” said Ilna. She wasn’t really angry; the business was too puzzling for a normal emotion like that. “Six or eight of you could slide a slab of rock into the narrow part that this thing couldn’t push out again.”
She kicked the huge corpse with her bare foot, then regretted the contact. One of the children shrieked in excited horror.
“Mistress wizards,” Arthlan said, bowing deeply. “God is God. We couldn’t act against Him, do you see? But if He chose to bring your powerful selves to the gateway, then—His will be done.”
“His will be done!” cried all the villagers in a ragged chorus. Their voices echoed from the slopes in a diminishing whisper.
“His will?” shouted Alecto. “How about my will, Sister take you?”
Jumping down like a cat, she grabbed Arthlan by the throat and punched the dagger just beneath his breastbone, striking upward for the full length of the blade. The priest gasped and remained standing for an instant as Alecto withdrew the bronze.
Only those closest could see what had happened. Oyra screamed and clawed at Alecto’s face. Alecto gave the woman a backhand slash across the eyes.
“They’ve killed Arthlan!” cried a man. He swiped at Alecto with his torch. “Don’t let them get away!”
Torches glittered in all directions. There were villagers on the slope both above and below the temple.
“Inside!” Ilna cried. She jumped over the God-thing’s corpse. The shock of her right foot coming down on stone was like a bath in fire, but that didn’t matter.
Alecto was inside with her. Together they slammed the panels shut.
“Here’s the bar!” Alecto cried, banging it through the staples despite the bad light.
“There!” she added. “That’ll hold them.”
“Yes,” said Ilna. She didn’t add, “And then what?” because the question wouldn’t have done any good.
At this point, she wasn’t sure anything would do her and her murderous companion any good.
Garric was saying, “Lord Thalemos, before you met Metron did you—”
The driver jumped to its feet and began screeching like a tortured cricket. Instead of guiding with gentle touches on the millipede’s neck, the Archa jabbed the creature violently with the solid end of the rod.
Garric ran forward, though he wasn’t sure what he intended to do there. He had his hand on the sword hilt, but he didn’t draw the weapon. Vascay trotted with him, as lightly as a one-legged canary.
Thalemos came also. He might as well; there’d be as much safety with Garric and Vascay as there was anywhere in this place.
Metron didn’t stand, but he lowered his book and craned his neck to see past the driver’s leaping form. The Archa’s movements looked wildly spastic to Garric, but they were apparently proper for a six-limbed creature. At any rate, the driver looked to be in less danger of falling from the millipede’s back than the seated wizard was.
A pool gleamed through the great grassblades off to the right side. Water, Garric thought, catching the sun….
And then knew he was wrong, because the pale, pearly glow wasn’t sunlight—and because water wouldn’t slosh itself out of its basin and flow in the direction of the millipede.
“It can’t have been the Intercessor!” Metron said, opening the case which held the instruments of his art. He dropped his scroll carelessly inside and snatched out a small flask; he didn’t bother to close the case. “It’s chance! It’s bad luck!”
The millipede ambled on at its same steady, ground-devouring pace, though it was turning slightly but noticeably leftward. The terrain became furrowed. The creature climbed without difficulty, but the angle and rocking motion made Thalemos wobble.
Garric grabbed the youth and steadied him. They took the millipede’s movements the way Garric had learned to ride a ship’s storm-tossed deck.
Vascay bent so that he could grip the linked gold netting with his left hand, but he kept his eyes turned to the right. From where Garric stood, the liquid from the pool had disappeared in the trees; perhaps, perhaps there was a distant gleam as the millipede started down the far side of the furrow.
Metron’s flask was of clear glass with gold-filled etchings on the inside. It held a yellowish powder, too pale to be sulfur. As the wizard spread the contents in thin lines to form a hexagram, the powder darkened to the angry red of dying embers.
The driver squatted again but kept turning its triangular head to look back the way they’d come. Its sharp-edged upper limbs twitched out and in, folding like shears, as if the Archa were slashing something only it could see.
The millipede’s foreparts were on level ground; ahead another furrow loomed. Vascay released the safety net and straightened.
“Any notion what the excitement’s about, boy?” he asked Thalemos in seeming nonchalance. He gave a minuscule nod toward the crest behind them; the millipede’s segmented body was still crossing it.
The youth shook his head vehemently. “I don’t know any more about this place than you do!” he said. Then he managed a wry smile, and added, “And I don’t like it any better than you do either.”
Vascay chuckled. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”
“Chief?” Hame called from the midst of the other men on the third segment. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing we need worry ourselves about,” Vascay replied in a cheerful tone. “Though I’ll tell the world I’m going to be glad to get back to a place I’ve been before, even if there’s Protectors in it!”
Turning his face away from the bandits, Vascay added under his breath, “Nothing we need worry about, because there’s not a single damned thing we can do about it, eh?”
Metron began chanting in time with the motions of his athame. He’d stoppered the flask again. Around the hexagram the wizard had drawn words in the Old Script, using the brush and bottle of cinnabar as previously. In the center of the figure glittered the sapphire ring.