Alecto slipped into the passageway, moving with the silent grace of a cat. The passage was windowless. Some moonlight slipped past the inner door, but she hadn’t bothered to swing it fully open.
Ilna followed, wrapping the gathered noose back around her waist as an additional belt. Though…the temple faced south, into the full moon. There should be light enough outside the entrance for any guards present to see whatever design Ilna knotted. She took the hank of short cords out of her sleeve, smiling faintly as her fingers worked. “I’ll deal with the guards,” she said.
Instead of replying, Alecto merely looked back over her shoulder with an expression that was unreadable in the shadows. In a sharper tone Ilna said, “Don’t attack them, I mean! I’ll take care of anyone out there quietly.”
The outer door was heavy, bronze or bronze-covered like the inner one. There were staples and a heavy crossbar to lock it from the inside, but for now all that held it was a spring catch at the upper edge. A drawstring was reeved through a hole in the panel to open it from outside.
Alecto reached for the catch with her free hand. Ilna caught her arm. “I don’t want you stabbing somebody,” she said, each syllable a needle point. “Put your knife away.”
Ilna didn’t know why it mattered to her. Perhaps because as she’d watched the rabbits butchered, she realized that her companion was just as quick to offer blood sacrifice as the priests had been.
Alecto tossed her head dismissively. “All right,” she said, sheathing her blade with a quick motion. “I won’t kill anybody if you’re so squeamish.”
She tripped the catch and put her shoulder against the door to ease it open. Ilna waited, suppressing her frown. She’d meant to go out first, but it probably didn’t matter.
Alecto stepped outside. Ilna couldn’t see much except moonlight past the other girl’s shoulder, but that meant there wasn’t a covered porch that would keep a guard from seeing the pattern knotted into her cords.
“It’s clear,” Alecto said, stepping out of the building so that Ilna could follow. Then, “What is this place? These are houses!”
They were on a hill from which two- and three-story buildings marched down to a harbor. Patches of lamplight, yellower than the moon, shone from windows onto the winding streets; music trembled on the breeze.
Not long ago Ilna too would have been startled, but she’d seen far larger cities in the months since she left Barca’s Hamlet. “Come on,” she said crisply to Alecto. “We don’t want to stay around here.”
She shoved the door closed. Its weight resisted her, but the hinges pivoted smoothly. Too late Ilna remembered the bell note with which it had closed behind the crowd of priests and worshippers. She grabbed the long horizontal handle; even so, the door, several times as heavy as she was, bonged against its jamb.
Lamplight flared beside the steps leading down from the entrance. The caretaker’s room was built under the staircase. “Who’s there?” a man called as he stepped into view.
It was the servant who’d opened and closed the doors for the ceremony. He held his belt in his left hand and was drawing his hook-bladed sword from its scabbard.
“Hey, don’t worry,” said Alecto, unpinning her wolfskin cape with her left hand. “There’s room for you at the party too, handsome.”
She swept the cape off her torso, twirling it in a quick figure-eight. Her breasts were full but firm, standing out proudly from her hard-muscled chest. She sauntered down the steps, dangling the cape from the fingers of her left hand.
Ilna was cold with fury, though not even she could have said whether she was angrier at herself or at her companion. The caretaker stared transfixed at the wild girl’s naked chest. The spell Ilna had knotted into her cords was as useless as it would have been on a blind man. Of course, the fellow was frozen as rigid now as Ilna’s pattern would have left him.
Alecto glanced at Ilna, grinning in a mixture of mockery and open lust. “So, fellow, are you man enough to handle both of us?” she said to the caretaker.
He swung his heavy sword up for a chopping blow. “Harlot!” he screamed. “Profaning the house of the Mistress! I’ll—”
Alecto was just as skilled with the knife as Ilna had expected; her right hand dipped to the ivory hilt and came up to thrust the long blade through the fellow’s throat, choking the rest of the words in his blood. He’d only begun his own stroke.
The caretaker stumbled backward, continuing to swing the sword. He was dead but his body didn’t realize it quite yet.
Alecto toppled with him, cursing; her dagger was caught in cartilage, and she didn’t want to let go of it. Ilna’s noose settled over the caretaker’s wrist and jerked his arm harmlessly to the side. The sword, a clumsy thing better suited to pruning than war, clanged a sad note against the lowest step.
Alecto set her left foot on the caretaker’s chest and tugged her blade free. Blood gushed from both the wound and his mouth. His eyes stared at Ilna as she freed her rope.
Alecto lifted the man’s kilt to wipe her dagger. When he guarded the door during the service he’d worn a leather vest and cap as well, but he’d taken them off in his lodgings.
“Too bad,” she said, grinning at Ilna again. “He’s hung like a pack pony. I wouldn’t have minded a little fun with him. First.”
Ilna looked at the other woman with a loathing that made her stomach roil…but she’d let Alecto lead, and Alecto’s actions when the caretaker appeared showed a quick mind—though a disgusting one.
Ilna had alerted the caretaker by slamming the temple door. There was no question of whose fault the sprawled body was.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ilna said quietly. She nodded toward the countryside visible beyond the squat blocks of houses. “There’s woodland out there to the west. We can hide until daylight and then…”
Then what?
“Then make plans,” Ilna concluded. After all, that was what most of life was about: going on until, she supposed, you couldn’t go on anymore.
Cashel heard pipe music, a skirling high-pitched sound very different from the golden tones of the wax-stopped reeds Garric had played to the sheep in Barca’s Hamlet. He got to his feet with an easy motion, the quarterstaff crosswise in both hands; close to his chest, not threatening anybody but ready for whatever trouble chose to come.
“Cashel?” said Tilphosa. She was already standing, a pale figure in the shadows. “How did you bring us here? Where are we?”
“Mistress, I’m not sure,” said Cashel. He was polite by nature, but since he didn’t have any idea where they were or how they’d gotten there, he thought there were better uses for his time than talking about it.
Three sailors had come through with them: Hook, Captain Mounix, and a stocky fellow named Ousseau whose right arm and chest were bleeding from a deep cut. Ousseau cursed between moans; the two officers lay on the ground, turning their heads quickly in the direction of every noise. Mounix had retrieved the sword Cashel’d knocked from his hand; Hook was unarmed.
The pipe wasn’t playing a melody, just sequences of notes that had the same mindless quality as a brook flowing over rocks. Perhaps it was a natural sound, something the wind did in a hollow tree or the song of a night bird.
“Where’d the temple go?” Mounix said, rising to one knee cautiously as if he was afraid that were his head to come up the roof’d fall in on him. “And these trees aren’t like what they were on Laut. Where are we?”
“The bark’s smooth,” Tilphosa said quietly as her left hand stroked the trunk beside her. She still held the block of stone close to her body; the weight must be straining her by this time, but she didn’t seem ready to give up her only weapon.