A few of those listening started to cheer. All Sharina could think of was that the Sister might very well have Carus’ soul soon—and the souls of every man of his army as well, if the king’s haste led him into yet another misjudgment.
18
Alecto leaped onto a bench, then set one foot on the crossbar and braced the other against the sidewall so that she could look out through the small circular window in the transom. A villager shouted a warning.
The wild girl jumped down. A torch smacked the opening, knocking sparks into the temple. Alecto responded with an oath that Ilna—who didn’t believe in the Great Gods or much of anything else—found disgusting. Ilna snatched the bedding clear, but the sparks burned out before they landed.
“They’re not trying to break the door down,” Alecto said quietly. “They’re hanging back on the porch, looking at the lizard I killed.”
“They probably don’t see any reason to hurry,” Ilna said, thinking through the pattern which connected the past to the future here at this point. “Hunger will bring us out before long—if they don’t decide to block the door from their side”
She smiled with wintry humor. “A pity that the creature ran outside that way,” she added. “We wouldn’t have lacked for food if it’d died where you stabbed it.”
Alecto gave her a look of irritation, apparently uncertain whether Ilna was joking. Since Ilna wasn’t sure herself, the confusion was understandable.
Something thumped against the door. Ilna hesitated, deciding between her noose, the hank of cords in her sleeve, and the small bone-cased knife she carried in her sash for general utility. In the end she readied the silken noose. It wasn’t a good weapon for these tight quarters, but she liked the feel of it. There wasn’t light enough to expect their attackers to see a knotted spell.
Alecto hopped up to the transom again, then dropped back with a grim expression. This time the villagers didn’t fling a torch at her.
“They’re piling rocks in front of the door,” she said. “They’re going to block us in.”
Ilna nodded without expression. “I’ll see where the cave goes, then,” she said. It led to somewhere big enough to hold a salamander the size of a horse, after all. And since there were no other options…
Alecto didn’t seem to have heard her. Outside on the porch, villagers crunched another block of stone down beside the first. With the whole community working, the entrance would very quickly be blocked beyond the ability of the two women to clear.
“I’ll kill you all!” Alecto screamed at the door panels. “I’ll wipe you off the face of the Earth, you cowards!”
The wild girl knelt and began drawing on the floor with her athame. The blade was covered with the priest’s blood, but it had mostly dried by now. She spat on the bronze so that her point left thin red trails of dissolved gore on the stone.
Her face screwed into tight, sour lines, Ilna lay on her belly and crawled cautiously into the narrowing cave. The rock was slimy—from the salamander’s skin, she now knew, not water sweating through the limestone as she’d thought when Arthlan first showed them the temple’s interior.
Peasants got used to filthy jobs. Ilna smiled: the slime would wash off, if she lived long enough to reach a place with clean water. That didn’t seem likely at the moment.
Her body blocked the little light that entered through the temple’s transom. She regretted that, but Alecto’s chanting also blurred into a dull murmur. Ilna didn’t know what the wild girl was attempting, but it probably wasn’t anything a decent person wanted to know about.
The tunnel narrowed further. The salamander was thicker through the body than Ilna, but it must be able to squeeze itself down to a degree that a human rib cage couldn’t. If she became stuck in the throat of the passage—
Ilna laughed—and regretted it, because the stone didn’t let her body shake with laughter as it should. If I get stuck, she thought, I die in a small stone box. Which is exactly what happens to me if I don’t find a way out of the temple in the first place.
Ilna had her arms stretched out in front of her. She squirmed forward by twisting her torso while one elbow or the other anchored her against the stone. It was slow and unpleasant, but—she smiled—not as slow or as unpleasant as the alternative.
Tight places didn’t especially bother her. Stone did, though, but there wasn’t anything to do about the fact except ignore it and keep on going. In Ilna’s philosophy, going on was the only choice.
The cave started to open up again—not much, but enough for Ilna to reach out with both hands against the stone and pull her hips through the narrowest point. She could smell water close; if nothing else, that meant she and Alecto would starve in three weeks instead of dying of thirst in three days.
She got up on all fours, then lifted her head carefully in hopes that there was room enough to stand. No, the ceiling was still just above her. At least she could keep her torso off the ground.
She reached forward with her right hand and shifted her weight onto it. Her palm slipped down a short, slimy slope into water as cold as charity. She jerked back and just missed lifting her head hard into the rock.
Ilna paused for a moment, tasting the water—good, though with a slight tang of iron—and getting her breathing back under control. Maybe I’m more nervous than I’d thought…. Because of all the stone, she supposed; but that was no excuse, there were no excuses.
Alecto’s chant echoed down the tunnel, blended into a threatening rumble by its passage. Occasionally a word came clear: “…palipater patrima…” in one moment, “…iao alilamps…” in another.
Ilna explored the edge of the pool with her left hand, hoping she’d find something more promising on the other side than there was in the direction she’d come. There wasn’t another side: when Ilna stirred the water, it lapped against a solid stone wall. The pool wasn’t much bigger than the tunnel through which she’d crawled to reach it.
She felt as far as she could reach into the water without finding bottom. There was enough water somewhere to hold the salamander now dead on the temple porch; it was possible, probable even, that this pool was a tunnel like the one that led to the outside; but slightly lower and flooded.
“…nerxia…” echoed a voice, no longer identifiable as Alecto’s or even as human.
Of course even if there was a larger cavern beyond, it too might be water-filled: an underground sea in which the monster slept motionless in the intervals between crawling to the surface to eat. It didn’t come out often, from what Arthlan had said. The salamanders Ilna knew, hiding under the rocks of Pattern Creek or crawling across the leaf mold on damp evenings, had none of the eager liveliness of mice and birds.
She hiked up her tunic to keep it dry—drier than otherwise, at least—and lowered herself feetfirst into the pool. She felt the smooth stone channel curve, but again she didn’t find an end. There was no point in trying to go farther unless she was willing to go all the way.
Ilna pulled herself out of the water, a harder task than she’d expected. The monster had polished the rock over the ages of passing to and from the outer world, and Ilna’s limbs were already numb from their immersion.
She breathed deeply on her hands and knees, then lay flat again and squirmed through the tunnel in the other direction. It was easier this time. She had a glimmer of moonlight to guide her, and she knew that there was an end.