The nearer bandits paused in their activities and turned. Halophus put the horn to his lips and blew, then pointed toward the chieftain when the more distant men looked around.
“Search spiderwebs for animals!” Vascay said. “Bring them to the wizard alive! Fast!”
He met Garric’s eyes. “Gar,” he said, “you live your way, and I respect you for it. For myself, I’m not enough of a philosopher that I won’t cut the throats of a few mice if that’s what it takes to save my life.”
Garric gave him a nod of understanding; his lips were tight. He didn’t try to argue.
Vascay stumped off toward Metron. Thalemos gave Garric a shamefaced glance and followed, carrying a silk-wrapped packet in his left hand.
Garric took a deep breath. His throat was dry as sand, and he hadn’t seen any water on this plain. “Duzi, help me,” he whispered.
He hadn’t been alone since he began wearing the medallion of King Carus a seeming lifetime ago. His fingers closed on the breast of his tunic, where the image hung when he was in his own body. Gar had nothing of the sort.
The Brethren were drifting toward Metron, some of them carrying loot they’d found in the tombs. Ademos had been particularly lucky: he had a gold brassard around either arm and a jeweled gold gorget bouncing from a neck chain.
Vascay had delivered his sacrifice and was casting around for more. His eyes met Garric’s momentarily, then resumed their quest for prey. The foliage was festooned with silk; sometimes a single coarse bush anchored as many as three webs.
What would Carus do? Not sit around here moping, that was certain. Garric was already convinced they shouldn’t stay in Wikedun any longer than necessary; watching Metron begin to pour the blood of little animals over his words of power only reinforced his conviction.
Garric laughed. Fine. If there were swamps on the other side of the hills, then there was water there. It might not be the best water, but the way his throat felt now he wouldn’t quarrel with pond scum or even a floating corpse.
Giving his sword belt a hitch to settle it more comfortably, Garric started southward. He’d scout the terrain, get a drink, and then return. Metron’s business would’ve concluded one way or another; hunger and especially thirst would’ve brought the Brethren into a more reasonable frame of mind than the euphoria at gold and their escape from the millipede had left them.
He turned, and called, “Vascay? I’m going to check the hills. I’ll be back, as the Shepherd grants.”
The chieftain looked up. He waved his javelin in acknowledgment.
There was a blast of crimson wizardlight. Metron’s robes and flesh became momentarily transparent; his bones were eerie shadows against the sunlit horizon.
Grimacing, Garric started walking again. The flash had stopped the Brethren in their tracks. Vascay called in a snarl, “Come on, you fools! Are you going to let a little light scare you out of saving your lives?”
Garric didn’t believe Metron’s blood magic would save them. He’d seen wizards use the power that came from letting lives out, and every time the result had been a bad one for the wizards and those who’d put their trust in the wizards.
He hiked on, heading for the notch in the center of the arc of hills. He’d reach it in half an hour. He wasn’t running away from Metron and Metron’s magic, but he couldn’t stay and watch what he knew was evil. Garric wouldn’t try to stop Thalemos and the Brethren from making their own choice, but neither would he be a party to it.
Wizardlight continued to flare like sheet lightning, casting its vivid scarlet across the landscape even in this bright sun. Garric’s shadow shivered ahead of him, an unstained blur framed by the ruddy touch of evil.
A trumpeter blew a long, silvery note. Garric thought it was Halophus, his call echoing from the hills. He turned his head and saw the Brethren looking south in amazement.
The trumpet sounded again; Halophus hadn’t raised his own curved horn to his lips.
In the notch of the hills appeared the first elements of an army. The soldiers were on foot. Their commander hung in a litter between two huge monsters. He was anonymous at this distance, but the dragon banner fluttering above him was the standard of the Intercessor.
The soldiers pouring past into the plain in increasing numbers were lizards. They walked upright and carried bronze weapons, but they weren’t men. Their trumpeter called again.
Garric turned back toward his fellows. He held his scabbard with his left hand to keep it from jouncing against his legs as he jogged. It didn’t matter now what Metron was doing: Garric’s place was with the other humans trapped in this ancient graveyard.
Wizardlight pulsed from Metron’s circle of power, leaving afterimages of itself in Garric’s eyes between flashes. Most of the Brethren ran east or west, trying to escape from between the lizardmen’s hammer and the anvil of the sea. They couldn’t possibly succeed.
“Vascay!” Garric called. The peg-legged chieftain wasn’t running, and Lord Thalemos stood at his side with his arms crossed in aristocratic disregard for danger. The boy wasn’t much use in some ways, but Garric hadn’t seen any reason to fault his courage. “Hold where you are! There’s a way out!”
He wasn’t sure that the catacombs would save them, but a few armed men in a tunnel could hold off a thousand…for a time. Garric laughed as Carus would have laughed. That’s all life was, after all, time added to time until there was no more to add.
Ademos had ducked over the corniche, perhaps hoping to hide among the broken rocks below. He reappeared, flailing his arms in his panic. He’d lost the golden brassards already, and as he stumbled onto the plain he flung away the looted gorget.
Behind Ademos, climbing the cliff like ants making their way up a step, came a score of Archai chittering in metallic voices. They marched past Metron, ignoring Vascay and Thalemos as well, and began to form a line facing the oncoming lizardmen.
The Archai raised their saw-edged forearms, waiting. More of their fellows followed; Metron was raising a whole army of insectile monsters to battle the Intercessor’s forces.
Garric drew his sword and ran past the Archai, braced for them to slash at him with their poised arms. They didn’t even turn their heads.
“Come on!” Garric shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
The appearance of Metron’s allies hadn’t changed Garric’s mind about that. He grinned coldly. In fact, that had made him even more sure that this was no place for humans to remain.
Ilna hung in a sea of pearly light. She felt a wrench and found herself lying on a bed of rock like that of the cave.
Like, but not the same. She was in a shallow valley lighted by soft sunlight which something in the sky diffused. The barrier wasn’t the solid rock ceiling she’d watched while Alecto chanted, but neither was it the kind of overcast Ilna had seen in normal skies. There was a pattern to these thin streaks and whorls; she thought she could grasp it if she bent her mind to the task in just the right way….
The valley was sparsely forested. Pines and the smaller hardwoods like dogwood and hornbeam had managed to lodge their roots in the thin soil. There were tufts and hummocks of grass, sufficient to keep goats if not sheep like those used to the lush pastures of Barca’s Hamlet. At the far end a sheer basalt escarpment closed a trough in the softer limestone.
From the trees and on outcrops of rock hung the webs of spiders whose bodies were as big as a hog’s. They stared at Ilna with multiple glittering eyes.
Ilna had come—she’d been brought—to the spider-swathed hellworld which Tenoctris had found in the brain of the dead Echeus. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here, and it seemed very unlikely that she’d have time to find a way out.
Ilna stood because it seemed undignified to die lying down. A silver-and-black spider the size of a bull had left its web and was walking toward her on legs as thick as Ilna’s own. The tree which anchored one side of the structure of wrist-thick silk was a hundred and fifty feet high, but it swayed to be free of the spider’s weight. Her steps had a mincing precision like those of a crab underwater.