The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [175]
I grumbled and picked my way, and when we had negotiated the ditch itself, I said softly, “I suggest we wait on the far side of the ditch-work. That will be beyond the reach of any lights they may bring.”
“And also beyond reach of providing assistance. No, let us make use of this altar-stone. Even if they have a torch, it should be simple enough to keep away from its beam.”
“You want to sit under that massive slab of rock?” I said, my voice climbing.
“It's been there forever, Russell, it's not about to flatten us.”
“Holmes, a bunch of amateur archaeologists hoiked it up barely twenty years ago,” I protested.
“You don't say? Well, it hasn't fallen yet,” he noted serenely, and ducked underneath.
It would be an irony if I had survived numerous opportunities to plummet from the sky only to be squashed by a boulder. All in all, I thought as I inserted myself beneath the precarious dolmen, I'd rather be harvesting honey in Sussex, where the greatest risk was being stung to death.
I draped us in the blankets, which would not only keep our muscles from freezing stiff but might help us blend into the shadows underneath the rocks. Hunched together, shoulder to shoulder, we waited for Ragnarok, the end of the world.
The Sacrifice of Setting Loose (2): This is when the
Practitioner knows that the Work is ready: when his Focus
is absolute. When the Will of his community is behind him.
When the Tool is in his hand and his hand is in the Tool.
When the Place is understood, and arranged, and reached.
When the stars are aligned, and he can feel the quiver as
Time's mechanism prepares to strike.
Testimony, IV: 8
DO YOU SUPPOSE THEY'LL WAIT UNTIL MIDNIGHT?”
I asked, after what seemed a long time.
“Testimony refers to it as the ‘witching hour.’ ”
“Can he actually believe that human sacrifice looses powers'?” I wondered.
“Russell, you are the expert in religion, I merely pursue crime.”
“This is neither. It's madness.”
“Yes. But madness has method.”
We were gambling a life—possibly a child's life—on the demands of that method. That the man—the men?—in the abandoned hotel would place ritual above the practical. That a man—or men—who would dismiss as unimportant the fact that an eclipse did not actually touch the chosen site, would nonetheless preserve the details of the act as if it did. That an ordinary midnight would take precedence over the actual hour of fullest eclipse.
“One of us should go back to the hotel,” I told Holmes.
“They will be on guard there; here, they will be preoccupied.” The decisive words were belied by the tightness in his voice, but I did not argue, because he was right.
We huddled together, a terrible weight over our heads, and our doubts grew along with the cold.
“I have my pick-locks,” I said forty minutes later. “If we let ourselves in the front door—”
His body rather than words cut me off, as he went from tense to taut. I stared in the direction of the hotel, seeing nothing.
“Did you—” I began.
He hissed me to silence, and a moment later, I saw it too: a brief play of light defining the corner of the building, there and gone again.
Several minutes passed before it came back, but when it did, the light was steady and general, not the darting beam of a torch. Good: A lamp made it less likely they would spot us.
With a single movement, Holmes and I drew our revolvers from our pockets and held them to our chests beneath the concealing wool. The approaching group was at first a confusion of legs, dancing in and out of the light; then it resolved itself into two men.
They paused at the encircling ditch-works, and we heard voices, but not the words. When they moved again, it was around the Stones, following the raised earthen mound in a clockwise direction. We watched, shifting to keep well back from their side of the altar stone: One man, wearing dark trousers,