Then that small noise was gone, too, swallowed up and extinguished by a scream that tore open the still air. Daenek and Lessup scrambled to their feet as the echoes from upstream died like sobs.
Daenek readier her first, with Lessup running just behind him. Rennie seemed to be sleeping on her side, with the stream only a few feet away from her outstretched hand.
He touched her shoulder and, as if awakening, she rolled onto her back. A wave of blood pumped over his hand, welling from a diagonal slash that ran from her throat into her stomach.
Daenek froze, then, without thinking, knelt and pressed his hands to the wound, but the blood kept coming, streaming between his fingers.
“No,” he heard Lessup say in a high, strangled voice behind him. Daenek jerked his head around and saw the other’s face, drained white with shock, the eyes staring past him at the figure on the ground.
“Not—” He backed away, whipping his head from side to side.
As he turned to run, Daenek reached for him with one of his stained-red hands, but Lessup eluded his grasp and darted into the forest.
Slowly, his mind frozen into a red eternity, Daenek turned back to Rennie, Her eyes opened and a moan broke through her pale lips. “It hurts,” she said in a voice like a small child’s. “It hurts so much.”
He touched her cheek. “Don’t move.”
Something wet traced through the red smear Daenek’s hand had left on her face. “I can’t even see you,” she said. The voice was very weak, a thread. “It hurts, don’t go away—”
Her mouth fell open and the side of her face rolled against the ground. Daenek stood up. His clothes were heavy with blood and clung to his skin. Something was in his hand. He opened his fingers and saw that somehow he had picked up the seeklight.
Looking up from it, he saw the edge of the stream becoming threaded with scarlet.
At last he turned away and walked slowly into the forest. Only a few meters away he found Lessup’s body, twisted in a growing pool that seemed black in the darkness of the trees. On the face was the same expression of shock and horrified disbelief.
A noise somewhere behind him. He turned around. There was a brief glimpse of a metal face with glowing eyes, something sharp that struck and slashed his face, and a scream of triumph and rage.
Chapter XXI
When he came to, a leather cord around his neck jerked him to his feet. His wrists were bound so tightly behind his back that he could no longer feel his hands. He wiped his face on his shoulder, trying to clear the blood from his eyes.
There were ten or more of the bad priests in a circle around him. A few still had scraps of their brown robes hanging in tatters from their shining metal limbs, but the others were bare or daubed with paint. The one that held the end of the leather cord had a grinning caricature of a mouth drawn across the bottom of its face. Daenek saw that there were also slivers of glass tied with dirty string to the tips of its fingers. A knife dangled from a rope around its middle.
It tugged on the cord, pulling Daenek along after it. The others followed, brandishing their weapons, long pointed sticks or pieces of metal bent and sharpened to a cutting edge. Daenek stumbled, and the leader snapped him forward with the cord.
From behind him came a shrill chorus, like screaming laughter.
They walked for several kilometers along a trail cut through the underbrush. A sick exhaustion seemed to grow inside Daenek like a hollow space under his ribs. He kept his head down, seeing only the small splotches of light that penetrated through the trees overhead.
As they mounted the top of a small rise, Daenek had his first glimpse of the old palace. Most of it was hidden by trees, and what was visible seemed to be decaying rapidly. The remains of what had been a tower at one corner lay strewn about in piles of rubble. The rows of windows set into the front facade were smashed, lying in multi-colored shards around the wide doors ripped off their hinges.
And the bad priests—scores of them, crouching together in little groups near the walls of the palace, or stalking about in their loping, wolfish gait—a milling tableau of blank, inhuman faces and metal limbs. No wonder we ran right into them, a part of Daenek thought dispassionately. There must be a couple hundred of them. And we were headed right into their lair.
As the bad priest led Daenek through the figures, the same howling cry spread among them until it rang and throbbed in Daenek’s ears. A metal hand reached for his thigh with a sharpened triangle of metal. The leader slapped it away and cried “No!” in its high, wailing voice. “This is the one! The one!”
Daenek wondered dully what it meant, why he had not been killed at the stream in the forest instead of being marched here and saved. For what reason? he thought.
The bad priest stopped in front of the palace and removed the leather cord from Daenek’s neck. Then it roughly pushed him through one of the gaping doorways. None of them followed him into the dark interior.
Daenek rubbed the chafe mark on his neck and looked around, letting his eyes grow used to the dark. The doorways were either blocked by rubble or groups of bad priests, their blank faces peering in at him with an avid greed. He turned away, the happenings of the last few hours having driven him beyond simple fear.
He seemed to be in some kind of large anteroom. Underneath years of accumulated dirt the floor was made of the precious veined rock from the distant quarry of Daenek’s childhood.
Heavy drapes and tapestries, like fluted columns of dust, reached up into the unseen heights of the room.
The small clouds of dust raised by his feet eddied in the still air as he walked farther inside. A fallen chandelier lay like a small mountain of age-dulled gems. Beyond that, the outlines of a great curved staircase rose up from the floor.
Mounting the first step, Daenek turned and looked back at the blank, yet savage faces of the bad priests peering in at him, waiting. Even if this is the end of it all, he thought, maybe I can still die knowing. Or trying to.
The stairs led to the hub of a network of branching corridors.
He hesitated, then headed down one he could see sunlight pouring in from a point on one side. When he reached it, the opening proved to be a balcony overlooking an open courtyard.
Several of of the bad priests were in the open space. Some of them were clustered around a pile of women’s clothes, rich embroidered gowns made velvet-like with dust and age. One of the machines wrapped a gown against its body, then threw its head back and emitted its shrill manic scream. The others—including the one that had led Daenek in—turned and scrabbled at it, shredding the gown with their talon-like fingers.
Daenek drew back from the balcony before he could be spotted by them. Standing in the corridor he became aware of a faint electronic whine coming from somewhere very close. The seeklight, he thought suddenly. He reached into his pocket and brought it out. The smooth metal was sticky with drying blood.
The little faceted light was blazing, and the shrill note became louder as he pointed the device towards the unexplored end of the corridor. The only direction I’ve got left, he thought. I might as well follow it.
Tracing whatever path kept the tiny light brightest, Daenek moved through the old palace. Corridors without light and cramped with musty air, high-ceilinged rooms that filled with the echoes of his steps as he crossed them. In one, he saw the sun set through a stained-glass window as he passed.
The seeklight’s whine seemed to become as loud as the bad priests’ cries had been when Daenek stood at last before a pair of metal-studded doors. The last stairway he had followed had descended deep into the bowels of the palace, into this silent chamber lit only by the last flickering radiance of a near-dead fluorescent panel in the ceiling. Daenek set his palm against the edge of one of the doors and pushed it open.