“Repented and was delivered,” Erik said.
They continued walking while they spoke; inside the temple, ambush seemed less likely. Their footsteps echoed enough to make Erik sure they’d hear any oncoming attackers, and the light, gloomy as it was, let them see a good distance ahead. The walls to either side were sturdy too, whatever they were—or they looked that way. Erik kicked one of them gingerly, not wanting to touch the stone with his bare hands.
It felt like real stone against his toe. The wall didn’t scream either, which was some reassurance, until he reflected on the possibility that they were wandering inside a living creature that didn’t feel pain when a large man with dragon blood kicked the inside of its organs.
He was very glad when Toinette spoke again. “Odds are I’ve committed a few hundred sins in my day, and I can’t say that I’ve been absolved for all of them. You know.” Erik did. Most priests wouldn’t believe in the dragon-blooded without riot-causing proof, and a fair number of those who were convinced would likely think them irrevocably damned to begin with. Outside of Loch Arach and a few other places, sins committed in dragon form went unconfessed by necessity. “But,” she continued, “I somehow doubt repenting is going to get us out of this.”
“Aye, well,” said Erik, “we’re not prophets.”
“That’s one reason, I’m sure.”
The hallway went on, stretched out like melted tallow. Erik thought it shrank as they walked, but if so, it was never enough to make him certain, only to keep him looking at the ceiling and the walls, trying to measure the distance with no marks to serve as guidance.
A sound crept in around their footsteps. Not quite a slurp, nor yet entirely breathing, it was a wet inhalation that at first put Erik in mind of a man sucking on a bad tooth:shluuuuh, shluuuh. Every little while they heard it, drifting through the hallway from no direction that either of them could tell.
“On theHawk,” said Toinette, the third or fourth time, “that sort of thing would mean a leak, and a damned bad one. Not quite the same noise, but—close.”
“I’ve heard men breathe nearly that way when stuck through the lungs. Not quite, as you say, but very like.”
“Not quite, but very like. That’s the whole problem with this place,” Toinette said.
“I’d not say thewholeproblem,” Erik said, trying to joke. “Surely dark magic and deadliness count a wee bit too.”
He knew what she meant, though. Had the sound been exactly one either of them remembered, it might have meant trouble, but it wouldn’t have nibbled away at the edges of the mind, drawing attention to what might make it and what was wrong with that comparison. Hearing it was like looking at the temple and comparing its size to the landscape of the island from the air, or watching the elk-creatures move.
The power in the temple blurred edges, even where edges shouldn’tbe. That was as close as Erik could come to describing it.
* * *
Eventually, they did come to the end of the hallway: a blank gray wall, and a door to each side wide enough for a single man to pass through at a time. Both doors looked exactly alike, miniature versions of the ones that had led into the temple. Toinette looked from one to the other, then back to Erik, and shrugged. “Have you any preference?”
“No.” He frowned and slowly added, “We could try to see magically, but we’ve not the supplies for a complicated and guarded ritual. And as the less formal sort hasn’t worked elsewhere on the island…”
Toinette shook her head quickly. “If it does work here, what you see is as likely to drive you mad as to be useful.” She didn’t know that for certain. Still, the place was quite bad enough to merely mortal eyes. “Rather not take the risk to save us a little walking.”
“Aye. Right-hand door first, then. And be ready.”
With Erik in front of her, and the doorway small, a sword wouldn’t be much use. Toinette shifted her weight and drew her knife, prepared to throw it if need be, and staying alert for sounds from either the left-hand door or the passage behind them. None of that made her feel truly ready. She suspected that even a troop of armed and mounted knights wouldn’t have done that.
The inner door opened as readily as any in the normal world. Erik, anticipating otherwise, yanked it hard enough that it slammed backward into the hall with a thunderousboom. Toinette winced, gripped her knife harder, and flung a glance over her shoulder to see what might have responded.
Nothing stirred. Save for the dying echoes, the hall was quiet. Gradually Toinette let out her breath and followed Erik across the threshold, where they stopped and stared.
They were in a church.
Arcades stretched to either side of them, arches opening onto more blank stone. A path led down the middle to an altar as finely made as any Toinette had seen in her travels, made of dark wood and inlaid with the green-purple metal of the doors. Windows flanked it to either side, with stained glass cut in intricate patterns—but the light through them was that which had flashed through the forest.
Above the altar hung no cross, but rather a spiky, twisting shape that seemed to change as Toinette looked at it.
She remembered some of the stories about the Templars, and her throat went dry.
“I don’t smell blood,” Erik said, clearly thinking along the same lines she was, “not even old blood. But I’d not touch that.”
He gestured to the font near them, where a slick substance glimmered in a stone basin. As Toinette looked down, she saw her face reflected there. It was pallid white, which she could easily believe after her time in the forest, but the features were stretched far too long for it to be human.
She put a hand up and quickly felt her jaw and nose, making sure they were where they should be. “Damned shoddy mirror, whatever it is,” she said, trying to sound only irritated.
Erik clasped her shoulder. “Shoddy indeed. You’re only a wee bit dirty—still you.”
