As Ilna worked her way past the tunnel’s throat, a flash of scarlet wizardlight blotted the moonglow. Alecto’s voice rose into a high-pitched rant: “Brimo!”
Another flash, much brighter.
“Ananke!”
Ilna got her legs past the narrowest part of the cave. She thrust her feet hard at the rock walls, at the same time scrabbling forward with her arms. She didn’t know why she was in such a hurry, but if the wild girl was bringing matters to a climax, Ilna wanted to be present for good or ill.
Present for ill, probably. Even at better times, Ilna didn’t have much confidence in good things happening.
“Chasarba!” Alecto screamed.
Ilna squeezed out of the cave. Alecto knelt, holding her dagger point in the center of the figure she’d scribed in human blood. Her face was a study in hellish triumph.
Wizardlight blazed from the blade, penetrating flesh and even rock. For an instant Ilna saw the villagers staring at the temple with expressions of stark horror. Wingless things flew between suns in the void beyond the sky, and creatures swam like fish in the lava beneath the mountains.
The light died, leaving a memory of itself in Ilna’s eyes. Alecto laughed like a demon. The ground began to shake.
Outside the temple, villagers screamed. The first tremors were slight, but everyone who lives in a mountain valley knows the danger of landslides.
A violent shock threw Ilna off her feet. The mountainside crackled like sheets of lightning. Slabs of rock broke away, roaring toward the bottom of the valley and sweeping up more debris in their rush.
The tremors lifted dust from the temple floor; Ilna held her sleeve over her mouth and nose so that she could still breathe. The slope was shaking itself like a dog just out of the water.
The temple porch collapsed, blotting out the sheen of moonlight through the transom. Ilna grabbed Alecto’s shoulder and dragged her into the natural part of the temple, the funnel in the living rock. It might not survive the violence the wild girl had called down on the whole valley, herself included, but it might. Nothing made by men could possibly—
Cracks danced across the temple roof. “Come on!” Ilna screamed, pulling Alecto with her as far as she could. She couldn’t have explained why she was trying to save her companion, except perhaps that their two lives were the only things Ilna thought she might save from the thunder of destruction.
Going on is the only choice….
The cave narrowed. Ilna slid into the throat. “Come on!” she repeated, but she couldn’t hear her own voice against the shuddering terror of the earthquake.
The stone squeezed Ilna, battered her. It could close and chew her body like a grass stem in a boy’s mouth. No one would ever know that Ilna os-Kenset was a smear of blood between layers of stone.
She worked through, pulling herself into the enlarged chamber. She felt triumphant for the instant before a greater shock threw her against the ceiling, numbing her shoulders and nearly stunning her.
She turned. Water from the pool sloshed across her in icy fury.
“Alecto!” she shouted, knowing she might as well save her breath. She reached back into the tunnel. Her companion’s hand was stretched out, still gripping the bronze dagger. Ilna grabbed Alecto’s wrist and pulled, dragging her hips through the narrows.
There was nothing to see, nothing to hear but the mountain destroying itself and all the world besides. Guiding Alecto by the hand, Ilna poised on the edge of the pool.
She dived in, headfirst. She couldn’t swim, but her hands and feet against the smooth stone would take her as far down as she could go before she drowned or froze…or just possibly, she reached a place where a human could live, at least for a little while longer.
No choice….
Tilphosa screamed. Cashel jumped to his feet, slanting the quarterstaff across his body. He kicked the bedding into the darkness. The shuttered windows blocked all the light that Soong’s fog didn’t smother to begin with.
Leaning forward, Cashel swept his left hand through the air above where Tilphosa should be lying. His right arm was cocked back, ready to ram his staff’s ferrule through anybody he touched who wasn’t the girl herself. Nobody was bending over her.
Cashel scooped Tilphosa up one-handed and started for the common room. Rather than strike a light in here, he’d take her to the hearth and blow the coals bright.
Tilphosa’s body was as cold as a drowned corpse: colder than the air, colder than mere death.
The door at the far end of the passageway rattled open. Leemay stood back holding an oil lamp, while two of the men who’d slept in the common room stood in the doorway. One held a cudgel and the other, a fisherman, had a gaff with claws of briar root.
“Let me get her out into the light!” Cashel said. He’d let his staff drop in the aisle, but there still wasn’t width enough for his haste. His right hip brushed down a hamper of spirits in stoneware bottles; they clattered among themselves without breaking.
“It wasn’t a sound!” said one of the men in confusion. “I didn’t hear her scream, I thought it!”
The trapdoor into the loft overhead was open at the back of the room. A proper ladder leaned against the molding. In Barca’s Hamlet, most people used fir saplings trimmed so that the branch stubs provided steps of a sort….
“Get out of my way!” Cashel said, pushing into the common room. The fisherman jumped out of his way in time; the other fellow didn’t and bounced back from Cashel’s shoulder. Cashel laid Tilphosa on the bar, cradling her head with his left hand until he found a sponge to use as a pillow.
The fellow’s comment about thinking the scream made Cashel frown. That’s what it seemed to him, too, now that somebody’d mentioned it. He’d been asleep, though, and dreaming—
Leemay held the lamp so that its light fell on the girl’s face. The innkeeper was expressionless, scarcely livelier than Tilphosa…and Tilphosa might have been a wax statue, her face molded by an artist whose taste was for art that showed bones and ignored the spirit.
“What’d you do to Tilphosa?” Cashel said. Anger deepened his voice. The two men flinched; Leemay did not.
The outside door was already ajar. The left panel opened fully, and more people bumped their way in. Either they’d been summoned by the scream, or somebody’d gone out to call them.
“How could I touch her?” Leemay said. “She was with you; I was up on the roof.”
The lamp trembled in the innkeeper’s hand. She was weary, weary from the spell she’d just woven on the roof.
The fishermen touched Tilphosa’s cheek, then her throat, with the back of his fingers. “She’s dead,” he said. “Cold as ice. Somebody get the Nine.”
“Do you suppose it’s plague?” a man asked in concern.
Cashel grabbed for Leemay’s throat. She leaned back, too quick for him and a perfect judge of how far he could reach with the bar between them.
“Watch him,” she said to the local men around her. “He may have gone mad with grief.”
The bar was of heavy hardwood, anchored to the walls and floor, but Cashel would’ve pushed it over if the girl hadn’t been lying on it. He came out through the gate instead, tearing it away instead of folding it up and back.
Two men grappled him. Everyone was shouting; the only light was from Leemay’s lamp, though a woman in the doorway held a lantern with lenses of fish bladder.
Cashel caught the two men in his arms and rotated his torso, hurling them both over the bar and into wall. Somebody grabbed his legs. He brought his right foot back, then kicked hard with his callused heel. The hands released. Cashel lunged forward with his arms outstretched.