The chant deepened. Even at the first Ilna hadn’t been able to make out individual syllables in the echoing cavity of this temple, but now the sound had the groaning weight of the millpond frozen in midwinter.
The kneeling priests held knives; they flashed together in the moonlight. Black blood gouted into the reflecting pool. The reflected moon seemed to swell across the surface of the stained water.
A man cried out, but the chanting of his fellows continued like hollow thunder. A moment before, light had entered through the eye in the dome’s center and been reflected from the pool beneath throughout the temple; now the eye was dark, and the moon blazed in full glory where before the water had been.
Ilna’s limbs were tight with the strain of holding herself to the column, but her face grew rigid as well. She could see Alecto’s lips moving, but she couldn’t be sure whether the girl mouthed a curse or a prayer or a spell.
Something formed in the air above the moon. The worshippers’ voices were growing hoarse, but the chanting continued with even greater desperation.
At first it was only a blue nimbus, a haze of wizardlight. As the assembly shouted words of power, the ring of priests brought out athames and waved them to the rhythm of the chant; some slashed their own arms. Droplets of blood arced through the air, sinking without trace into the moon’s blazing face.
The nimbus shrank into three figures. They were no longer blue; they had no color at all, only a gray sheen as bleak as Ilna’s thoughts when she woke in the hours after midnight. They swayed to the rhythm of the chant.
Alecto’s face was stark with terror. Her tongue moved slightly, but the sound she made had no more meaning than a death rattle does.
The three creatures were as bonelessly supple as an ammonite’s tentacles, but their heads were flat and reptilian. Their conical bodies tapered from two squat, folded legs to the narrow snout. Their arms waved; they ended in cilia rather than fingers or claws.
The creatures were neither evil nor good; they merely were, the way the sea is or the sun. They were terrible beyond anything Ilna had ever seen.
The chanting stopped. Its echoes rolled about the dome for long moments after, but even that finally stilled. In the silence Ilna heard her companion whisper, “The Pack! These are the ones….”
The three figures faded gradually like fish swimming downward through clear water. There was a crackling that Ilna felt rather than heard; the Pack were gone, and the moon—edging westward past zenith—streamed through the dome’s eye again.
The pool was still clear, save for where the rabbits’ corpses lay on the coping. The last drops of blood leaking from the severed throats now swirled in dark tendrils through the water.
Gasps, whispers, and sighs of relief echoed through the domed hall. The tension had dissipated as soon as the worshippers below were sure the Pack were gone. The prayer had brought the creatures out of whatever place—whatever Hell—normally held them, but the worshippers were as frightened of the Pack as Alecto was.
Alecto had said only fools would loose the Pack. Ilna didn’t see any reason to fault her companion’s judgment on that point.
The guard threw open the door, sucking in a breeze to purge the warmth of enclosed bodies and the stench of fear. The worshippers drained from the room with a haste just short of panic, jostling at the doorway to the long entrance passage. They’d entered chanting, but there was no pretense of a recessional to put a solemn seal on the proceedings.
This wasn’t religion: it was wizardry, and wizardry of a particularly unpleasant sort. Ilna’s lip curled. Those who’d performed it were anxious to return to their homes and pretend they had no idea of what was going on.
The priests followed the layfolk, murmuring among themselves. They controlled their fears more carefully, but they too wanted to be gone. The pair—a man and a woman—who’d made the sacrifice carried away the dead rabbits in their baskets instead of leaving them for servants.
Did servants ever enter this room? Now that she thought about it, Ilna thought there’d been smears from previous slaughter on the pool’s marble coping before the priests carried out the present sacrifice. This was truly a sanctum, perhaps the more so because it didn’t hold the God’s image.
Only initiates entered. If they didn’t carry out menial tasks like scrubbing blood from the marble, nobody did.
The last of the priests passed from the hall; she didn’t bother to close the inner door behind her. Ilna heard the sound of steps shuffling down the passage, fewer and fewer, then the clang of the outer door. The hall was silent, save for the wind sighing softly past the dome’s open eye.
“All right, loose me!” Alecto said. She reached for her athame as she spoke, preparing to cut the rope if Ilna didn’t release her instantly.
Ilna’s hand twitched, curling the noose back around into her hand in a single motion. Manipulating the rope brought her to herself. Strength returned to muscles which her cramped position had reduced to trembling weakness.
Alecto spread her arms wide and gripped the column’s flutings between thumb and fingers while her legs circled the shaft. She scrambled down the pillar without waiting for Ilna to snub the rope off for her. She probably couldn’t have climbed without Ilna’s help, but she could get down again swiftly and safely by herself.
Ilna knew her own limitations. She hung the noose over two separated stone acanthus flowers, drew it tight, and lowered herself hand over hand to the floor. Going down, her body twisted on the rope, but at least she didn’t bang into the pillar as heavily as when she’d climbed.
Alecto was already at the inner door. Instead of peering around it, she stood at the hinge side. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed at the gap between the jamb and panel. She held her dagger by her side, the bronze blade concealed against her bare tanned thigh.
Ilna cleared her noose with a flick. She was a little piqued that Alecto didn’t notice the trick, and much more irritated to realize that the wild girl’s opinion mattered to her.
Alecto looked around. “There’s nobody in the hall,” she said, speaking in a low voice. She stared at Ilna appraisingly. “So,” she continued, “are you going to stick with me, then?”
Ilna frowned despite herself. “If you mean am I willing for us to continue on together,” she said, “then I suppose so. For the time being. Do you know where we are?”
“All I know is it’s a place I want to be far away from,” Alecto said. She glanced back at the air above the reflecting pool, now empty except for moonlight. “Raising the Pack! They’re insane!”
She faced Ilna abruptly with her eyes narrowed. “What were you doing where I found you, eh?” she said. “Are you fooling with the Pack as well?”
“Perhaps,” Ilna said, her hands shifting minusculely on the cord that she hadn’t yet wrapped around her waist again. “I may have been sent here to drive these creatures back where they belong. If you mean did I have anything to do with raising them, no.”
She suspected Alecto would be very quick and very deadly with her bronze dagger. If Ilna herself wasn’t quick enough to catch the girl’s neck and knife hand in her noose before the blade got home, well, then she deserved to die.
Instead of lunging, Alecto snorted, and said, “You’re going to drive the Pack? You’re crazier than this lot!”
She spat, then rubbed the gobbet into the marble with the ball of her bare foot. “Still, it’s no business of mine—if you don’t try anything so stupid when I’m anywhere around you. Agreed?”
“I’ll see to it that you’re warned,” Ilna said. “Now, shall we leave? Or shall I leave?”
The words were empty: Tenoctris had sent Ilna into the dreamworld to search. Ilna—and Tenoctris as well, most likely—had no idea of what to do to prevent those reptilian creatures from invading Carus’ sleep. Still, the statement had the desired effect of making Alecto relax and turn her attention to the passageway outside. Ilna supposed that sometimes it was better to mouth foolishness than to have to strangle somebody.