The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [131]
“Dearest one,” Orsith said, a smile lighting up his face. “I thought I saw you across the Etherion, although I confess my eyes are not what they once were. Only Mandu appears clear to me now. And good, sturdy Landus here, for he is ever at my side. A fine priest of Mandu he will make one day.”
The young acolyte bowed his head, but his smile was still clear for all to see.
“I wanted to ask you what you thought of the discourse today,” Melia said. “I’m afraid it was not as illuminating as I had hoped.”
“And yet you mustn’t cease hoping, dearest,” Orsith said. “For it is all we have in the end.”
Melia opened her mouth, but what she was going to say Durge never knew, for at that moment a peal of thunder rang out in the corridor. Again the thunder came, and again. Only it couldn’t be thunder, not here inside a building, however vast it was. And the sound was strangely sharp.
Screams echoed down the corridor, and people came running from the direction of the sound, robes clutched up around their ankles. Durge exchanged looks with the others, then they dashed down the corridor against the flow of fleeing priests and priestesses, leaving Orsith and Landus behind.
The corridor curved to the left, following the circle of the Etherion. Durge pushed his way past a tangle of priests in orange robes who were falling over one another in an effort to escape. Then he came to a halt, the others beside him.
Three forms lay sprawled on the white-marble floor of the corridor. Blood pooled around their bodies, as crimson as their robes. One stared upward, a corpulent man, his eyes bulging, his face a dead mask of astonishment. Durge recognized him; he was the priest of Vathris Bullslayer who had addressed the Etherion earlier that morning. By their robes, the other two were priests of the warrior god as well. All of them had been struck dead. Falken moved to the fallen priests; Durge followed. Acrid smoke hung on the air.
Durge and Falken both knelt to examine one of the priests. There was a small rent in the man’s robe. Falken tore the garment aside. The hole was not only in the cloth of his robe. A single small, red pit marked the center of the man’s chest; it was from this that the blood flowed. The hole looked not unlike an arrow wound to Durge. However, there was no sign of whatever it was that had pierced the priest.
Falken stood, his hand red with blood. “I don’t understand. What kind of magic could do this?”
Durge did not know, but as he knelt beside the fallen priest, he realized that they had learned one thing this day after all.
Even the Etherion was not safe.
43.
Lirith made her way through the crowded, dusty streets of the Fifth Circle, past countless merchants selling silver rings, rugs, ripe fruits, veils, and roasted meat. This was the outer circle of Tarras, where the poor, the forgotten, the outcasts dwelled. Again she shut her eyes, casting a thread out to the shimmering web of the Weirding.
Where are you, sisters? You must be here—you have to be. Show me how to find you.
However, the only answer was silence and the faint hum of life that coursed ceaselessly along the Weirding.
She opened her eyes and saw an old man sitting on a carpet on the street, selling mysteries of wood. These were tiny idols, representations of the New Gods a follower of one of the mystery cults might keep in a pocket or knotted in a scarf. Lirith recognized some of them: a crude wooden bull with a needle in its side for Vathris Bullslayer, a man with the face of a horse for Jorus Stormrunner. There were far more she did not know: a goddess with four arms and a serene, painted smile; a god with snowy wings sprouting from his shoulders; and another god with the legs and horns of a goat, a