Authors: Anne Logston
“Do you want to explore,” he muttered harshly, “or do you want to get out of here?”
Peri couldn’t argue with that, although as she let Atheris pull her down the hall, she murmured practically, “Well, the sick ones have to come out somewhere, too.”
Atheris said nothing, only dragging her faster through the hall until they caught up with the worshipers ahead of them.
“Stay quiet,” he muttered. “Sound carries well in here.”
The temple had seemed huge enough on the outside, but Peri revised her estimate of its size upward as the hallway they followed continued ever deeper into the bowels of the building without turning. The unease she’d felt at the doorway intensified, her skin crawling. The place seemed to be swallowing her.
Which makes me a temple turd, I guess, when I exit, Peri thought with a sudden irreverent glee that dissolved some of her fear. Come on, Perian. It’s a building, just a big old pile of stone blocks. I’m in danger, yes, but what’s new about that? The faster we go in, the sooner we come out.
But there was more to it than that. To Peri’s surprise, she could feel water deep beneath her, a great deal of it—most likely a huge subterranean reservoir—and with it, tremendous power, old and cold. She shivered again. In a land as dry as Sarkond, it certainly made sense to build their temple atop an underground spring; in a religion where priests were mages, it also made sense to build atop a magical nexus. But a spring that was also a nexus—Peri couldn’t begin to estimate the sheer power in that water, power this temple must control. Obviously this source hadn’t been drained dry during the war!
The worshipers ahead of them appeared to be slowing, and to Peri’s surprise she thought she saw more light ahead. The hallway opened at last into a huge chamber that she could barely see over the heads of the people in front of her, but she could hear chanting from the room, the slow throb of drums, and some kind of raspy scraping instrument.
Atheris had stopped, and Peri glanced at him. His eyes were closed; he was not chanting, but his lips moved as if he mouthed the words. She wanted to shake him, to urge him to get them out of here as quickly as possible, but she wondered uneasily whether he would be so easily persuaded. Whatever was going on here was obviously as unusual as it was important; a faint suspicion began to arise in her mind that perhaps Atheris had not tried as hard to avoid the temple as he might have.
She slid away from him easily; he seemed oblivious, almost entranced. She pushed her way through the crowd, careful that nobody would feel her sword under her robe. It took some time for Peri to work through the crowd to a point where she could see the focus of their attention; when she gained a reasonably clear vantage point, however, she frowned in puzzlement.
At the center of the chamber, separated from the crowd by a low wall, was a raised stone dais. A large ornate font had been built at the head of the dais, but to Peri’s amazement no water flowed there, and judging from the old, crusted stains, none had for some time. Atop the dais lay a sculpture made of what appeared to be pure gold—the image of a young man of exquisite beauty, apparently asleep, and beside him an equally gold sleeping woman, her arm draped across his chest, her head on his shoulder.
Peri shook her head. Aside from the obvious awe at the sight of so much gold in one place—much less in this impoverished country—and the marvelous lifelike quality of the statues, she could see nothing remarkable. But, then, she reminded herself, in religion it was not the object itself that held significance, but the symbolism and—
Then the golden woman stirred, and Peri froze.
“She wakes!” someone whispered. “The Whore will speak!”
For a moment her mind insisted that she was witnessing a miracle, the transmutation of lifeless metal into living flesh by some incredibly potent magic; then common sense reasserted itself and Peri breathed again. What she saw wasn’t a golden statue come to life; it was only an ordinary mortal woman covered in gold pigment.
The woman stretched languidly, her hand gently stroking the chest of the golden figure beside her, leaning over to press her lips hotly to his. Peri half expected the male statue to suddenly come to life, too, but apparently that one was a statue, for as the woman’s hand wandered slowly down the golden torso, the figure remained still under caresses which Peri was sure would have caused any living man to react in some visible fashion.
Undaunted, the woman sat up slowly, stretching again, showing off her sleek, gilded body to best advantage. The chanting all around Peri abruptly stopped; the sudden silence was eerie, and she had to fight to stand still, wanting very badly to duck back into the anonymity of the crowd. But everyone standing around her was utterly silent, utterly motionless, and any movement on her part would certainly draw unwanted attention, so she forced herself to stand perfectly still—
As still as the day I woke on a hunt and found a viper crawling over my leg, Peri thought grimly. I’m certainly in no less danger now—
Then the golden woman spoke, and absolute mind-jolting shock froze Peri, silenced her as no amount of fear could have.
“Welcome, poor fools, to the end of yesterday,” the golden woman said, and Peri heard in the cadence of her words, the shape of each syllable, what she should have seen immediately in the height of the woman’s cheekbones, the dark brown of her eyes, the tilt of those golden features.
Sarkond’s prophet, Eregis’s Whore, was a Bregond.
“You come to hear me give you promises for tomorrow,” the woman intoned. “But the time for promises is over. You have waited in hope and in the slow death of hope, and the time for waiting is done. You stand at this moment on the precipice, poor fools, of death and rebirth. The time is now. The final sign has come to pass. The Harbinger has come.”
A shocked murmur ran through the crowd. The sound swelled briefly, then died again.
“You have slept in the grave of your land,” the woman said. “You have eaten ashes. You have drunk bitter tears. You—have clothed yourselves in the shrouds of your dead. But you are waking, O Sarkond, waking with the hunger of a starving wolf ready to bare his teeth once more, ready to rend with his claws. Sharpen your claws, O Sarkond, for the time has come to hunt once more, to kill, to spill the blood of your enemy and bring new life to the land that bore you. Sarkond, I say you have slept too long. Wake! Wake your hunger, wake your land, wake your god!”
The murmur began again, swelled.
“Wake!” Eregis’s Whore rolled atop her sleeping lover, kissed him feverishly.
Slowly, softly at first, then louder, the crowd took up the chant.
“Wake. Wake. Wake. Wake.”
She rose to straddle the statue.
“Wake!”
Her passion seemed to infect the crowd. They were swaying now, shouting, almost wailing.
“Wake! Wake! Wake! Wake!”
Eregis’s Whore threw back her head, flinging her arms wide.
“WAKE!” she screamed.
And suddenly she was no longer gold, but dripping red, coated in a crimson deluge that flowed down from the ceiling, showering woman and statue alike. Peri rocked back in utter shock, her gorge rising; her mind tried to insist that the scarlet stream was colored water, wine, paint, anything but—but there was no mistaking that hot coppery smell as it poured down in seemingly endless torrents. The woman seemed undismayed by the deluge; to the contrary, she smeared the pouring liquid over her face and hair and breasts, bathed in it, collected it in her cupped hands to more thoroughly anoint her sculpted lover.
The crowd seemed inflamed by the gory spectacle, swaying and chanting more strongly.
“WAKE! WAKE! WAKE!”
And suddenly Peri could not bear a single moment more, not if it cost her her life, her very soul, and she pushed back through the crowd, roughly this time, caution forgotten, Atheris forgotten; her mind had room only for one thought—OUT.
Then she was in the hall again, shoving heedlessly past worshipers striving with equal fervor to push themselves into the central chamber, and for a moment she thought she was trapped. Before sheer desperation could tempt her to pull out her sword and simply hack and slash her way through the throng, however, she managed to squeeze past, and she staggered down the hallway as quickly as she could. The farther she got from the central chamber, the thinner the crowd, and at last she could move at a weak and shuddery trot, one hand steadying her against the wall as she fought down waves of helpless nausea.
She was, by her best guess, almost halfway back to the temple entrance when she remembered the priests and, more importantly, the guards at the door. There was no way she could slip past them without being observed, and no excuse she could give for her exit. No way out—
The left fork!
Hurriedly Peri forced herself onward, searching for the upward passage. Wherever that hall went, at least it wasn’t to that horrible central chamber. She’d find another exit and wait as long as she dared for Atheris. If he came, fine; if he didn’t, she’d have no choice but to leave for Bregond without him. Whatever evil was breeding in this diseased land and its foul temple, the farther away from it Peri could get, and the faster she could get there, the better!
There—the upward-angled hallway. Peri ducked into it, then leaned against the wall, breathing hard. There were no pilgrims here; either they’d already gone ahead, or they’d come back, attracted by the clamor in the central chamber, and taken the other fork to see what was happening. Peri was deeply grateful for the moment of solitude, no matter what its cause. It gave her a much-needed opportunity to take a few deep breaths and still her shocked trembling, fight down a panic more dangerous to her than any peril Sarkond had to offer.
Steeling herself, she made her way cautiously up the hallway. She couldn’t think beyond getting out of this insane, evil place; if she had to push her way through such diseased and malformed unfortunates as she’d seen on the road, so be it. Nothing could be more horrible than what she’d just witnessed.
But there was no one in the hall either to hinder her or to urge her on. The floor was smoothly worn in a sloping ramp rather than steps, and Peri found that she had to watch her footing on the slightly damp and rather slick stone as she made her way up the steepening incline. This passage wound more circuitously than the one below, as if it spiraled up through the temple; several-times-smaller passages branched off to the side, but she stayed with the main hall, thinking it most likely to lead to an exit. At last it ended at a closed door.
For a moment Peri considered simply knocking—after all, she’d been directed this way, and proceeding openly might be safer than attempting to sneak by—but immediately thought the better of it. If she presented herself for healing, she’d most likely be expected to remove her bandages and show her complaint, and if she exposed her face in this Sarkondish hell, she’d need considerably more than a healing spell. She pressed her ear against the door and listened intently, trying the latch after several moments passed with no sounds emerging from within.
The door opened slowly and, thankfully, without too much noise despite the damp. There was an empty room beyond, featureless except for rows of rough stone benches, now unoccupied, presumably for waiting supplicants, and a door opposite, slightly ajar. A little more light filtered in around this door, and Peri heard the mutter of voices and sounds of movement. She tiptoed across the room, touching the door—
Then the smell hit her and Peri pushed her hand hard against her mouth, biting into her knuckles in her effort to stay silent. Utterly helpless to stop herself, she peered around the edge of the door, ever so carefully. Surely, she repeated to herself, nothing could be more unspeakable than what she had seen in the chamber below.
She was wrong.
Four figures in horribly spattered robes were busy at their work, tipping a large copper cauldron over sideways, spilling its crimson contents through a grate in the floor, presumably to rain down on the figures in the chamber below. The cauldron was full, steaming gently in the chill room; the nature of its contents was unmistakable.
As was the source of those contents.
Several corpses still hung, head downward, from hooks in the ceiling, thin streams or mere droplets draining from their slit throats into basins positioned beneath them. More horrible, though, were the others, the drained and discarded victims piled heedlessly in the corners like empty wineskins. Each of the corpses showed some sign of disease or malformation, and in their vacant eyes Peri saw the fate of all those other unfortunates who had come here for the “touch of Eregis.”
Peri backed away from the door very slowly, biting back a scream. Every muscle was taut and shaking; her leg bumped one of the stone benches and for a moment of sheer terror the world went gray before her eyes. Then, somehow, she stumbled back out of that room, carefully closing the door behind her. Then she could stand it no longer; she collapsed, shuddering, half fainting, her hand still jammed against her mouth lest sheer horror force out a sound to betray her. She pressed her face against the cold stone of the wall and wet it with hot tears of hopeless terror.
I can’t go up, can’t go down, can’t go back—I’m trapped, trapped in here with that obscenity—
No. Stop it.
Peri took a deep breath, choking off her sobs. She swallowed hard and reached under her robe, clenching her hand around the comforting solidity of her sword hilt. Gradually her shaking stopped.
Panic kills more warriors than the deadliest foe. The first priority is surviving the next minute. Second is surviving the next hour. Third—
Peri pushed herself to her knees, her hand still clasping her sword.
Never mind third, she thought grimly. If I can get out of this hellhole and die in the clean open air, that’s good enough for me.
Then a hand clasped her shoulder, and Peri’s heart stopped.
“Perian,” Atheris whispered gently. “Come away from here.”
Almost numb, Peri let him help her to her feet. She followed him back down the hall, but they did not go far; almost immediately he ducked into one of the small side passages she’d seen, listening at doors until one apparently suited him. He opened it, glanced in, and then pushed Peri inside, following her and closing the door after him.