A pair of the autarch’s Leopards came toward the post. They ignored Qinnitan entirely as they unchained King Olin’s iron shackles from the post.
“Don’t be afraid, Qinnitan,” he said. “I am not.”
“I’ll pray for you,” she told him. “May the gods bring you peace, Olin Eddon ...!”
The king’s arms were still bound; the guards kept him upright as they led him away across the slippery stones, toward the platform and the waiting autarch. The Golden One looked back and forth between the reflective stillness of the Sea in the Depths and the massive, man-shaped stone outcrop at the island’s center—the Shining Man. The stone seemed dark as black jade, but Qinnitan had seen gleams of color pulsing through it—almost furtively, as though whatever lived inside it did not yet wish to make itself known.
As Olin’s guards led him up the crude stairs onto the autarch’s platform, the other soldiers herded the captive children down to the shore of the island, then forced them down onto their knees at intervals along the water’s edge. Panhyssir the high priest had appeared and had been helped up the steps so he could stand near the autarch. Several other priests were with him, and were already filling the air around the Golden One with incense and the sound of their prayers.
So this was how it ended, Qinnitan realized. All her struggles to escape, all her desperation, all of the times she had thought herself finally free… it all had come down to this. She was grateful she had saved Pigeon. But look! As if to prove how pointless rescuing a single child had been, now a hundred other children would be slaughtered here in front of her. Were the gods really so intent on showing her how worthless her efforts had been?
Panhyssir chanted in a version of Xixian so antique Qinnitan could barely understand it, the high priest’s great beard bobbing up and down against his swollen chest. The soldiers around the edge of the island, each one standing by a kneeling prisoner, watched the platform intently.
“You have me,” Olin shouted at the autarch. “Now let the girl go!”
Something was trying to get into Qinnitan’s head.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Sulepis said. “Guards! Bring the girl, too!” Another pair of soldiers hurried to unchain her from the pole and then shoved her stumbling toward the platform, but Qinnitan scarcely felt their rough hands.
Something else is watching us, she realized. The soldiers dragged her up the steps and dumped her beside Olin. Her heart, already beating fast, now began to pound against her ribs like a woodpecker’s beak. That monstrous thing I feel when the Sun’s Blood is inside me… it’s here.
The cavern seemed to be getting darker, but Qinnitan somehow knew it was not the world but herself that was sliding deeper into shadow. The presence was all around her, yet it was in her too, scenting the world of daylight and air through her senses, waiting just on the other side of some incomprehensible door that had been closed against it thousands of years ago.
Here, she realized, her thoughts flailing in sudden terror. This is where the door was shut, and it’s been waiting here all this time… waiting to come back ...!
Panhyssir raised his arms in a dramatic gesture, unaware that as he did so an entire world of darkness held its breath like a cat crouching beside a mousehole, stone still but for the lashing of its tail.
“Now!” The autarch’s voice quivered with pleasure and excitement. “Ah, now! The blood!”
The soldiers along the shore grabbed their child captives by the hair and bent back their heads. As each raised a blade to a slender neck, Qinnitan knew that what was happening here was even worse than the murder of children—a hundred times worse! A thousand times! All along the island’s coast the prisoners’ reflections stared back in horror, a hundred children and then a hundred more mirrored in liquid silver. Qinnitan opened her mouth wide to scream out a warning—didn’t they understand what the autarch was doing, the forces he was unleashing?—but the eager darkness was inside her as well as around her and would not let her make a noise.
The blades dipped, slid, and the children fell to the rocky ground as if they were sacks of meal—but to Qinnitan’s astonishment the young prisoners were all unharmed, their flesh unmarked; the guards had only pretended to slit their throats. But the reflections of the children, unlike the real children, had been mortally slashed by the reflected guards. Blood fountained from their ruined throats in the reflecting waters of the Sea in the Depth, but in the real world the children still lived; yet a red stain had begun to spread through the silver.
“Do you see, Olin—it is the sacrifice in the mirror lands that matter!” the autarch laughed. Qinnitan could barely hear him through the hammering in her skull, the feeling that her head would split open like rotten fruit. “It only matters what happens there, on the far side—that the mirror is clouded with innocent sacrificial blood!” He spread his hands to take in the whole of the Sea in the Depths. The silver sea roiled with scarlet, a bright stain that was spreading swiftly now in all directions as if real blood had been spilled, gallons of it. “And this is the greatest mirror that ever was—a mirror made from Habbili’s own godly essence!” He turned to his guards. “The children are no longer needed. The ritual has succeeded. You may dispatch the prisoners.”
“But you accomplished what you wanted—you don’t need to do that… !” Olin shouted in fury, then his voice choked off in a horrid, ragged sound like something tearing. And then, as the autarch’s Leopard soldiers began to stab the helpless, shrieking children who still knelt at the edge of the silvery sea, and chase down any others foolish enough to think they could escape, something began to happen to the king of Southmarch.
Olin’s guards held him up, but they did not find it easy: the northern king had begun to twist and moan like a terrified animal, eyes bulging as though something in his skull tried to force its way out through the sockets. All around him, screeching children were being caught up and slaughtered by Xixian soldiers, but Qinnitan could only stare in horror because the same thing that was clearly chewing its way into the northern king was pushing at her thoughts, as well—a very old, very terrible thing.
The surface of the Sea in the Depths was almost entirely scarlet now, and blood from the martyred children puddled in the low places of the stony island, but a hoarse shout from behind distracted Qinnitan even from this horrific scene. Far down the island shore, the loose reed boat had finally drifted across the Sea in the Depths and come to rest. Two men were climbing out of it even as the autarch’s soldiers raced toward them. One of the two wore armor of ordinary battered metal, but the other wore plate that glowed a strange blue-gray, and his helmet was of the same unusual hue.