Thirty-Four

Stone surrounded them. Erik thought it was stone, at any rate. It was solid gray, thick, and had no metallic shine to it. He could see no joinings or chisel marks, though, nor even any distinct blocks. By his feet, flat wall merged seamlessly into smooth floor. He imagined the same was true at the ceiling, though that was just too high for him to see well.

“No human hand made this,” he said.

Toinette shrugged. “Well. Demons, you said.”

“Aye, but I’d pictured them laying stones and all. Doing as humans do, but on a grander scale, and getting the rock from elsewhere if it came to that. Not that I had much reason to think I knew one way or another,” he admitted, not too unsettled to be embarrassed when he said it. Erik gestured around them. “This, where it’s all of a piece, it’s as though it grew.”

“Like a tree?”

“Or a creature.”

By her grimace, Erik knew Toinette was thinking along the lines he’d started to, of bowels and throats, and that she liked it no more than he did. “Thank you for that,” she said dryly. “How did Jonah end up faring, do you remember? It’s been a while since I heard that story at mass.”

“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 the Hawk,” 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 the whole problem,” 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’t be. 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 thunderous boom. 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.”

She quickly smiled her thanks, then returned to practical matters. “I don’t see a door out, but we might not from here.”

Real churches often had doors in the arcades, or behind the altar so that the priest could get to and from his chambers more easily. If the room they were standing in was a real church, Toinette doubted it was to any god she wanted to know about; still, they had to go further in.

Each took one side, stepping under the arches and traveling up the long stone floor. Walking so far apart, they still fell into rhythm with each other. Toinette thought her part of that might have been because she was listening to Erik’s footsteps, trying not to hear the steady, wet noise that continued around them. Hearing that was like having a slug crawl up her back.

There were no doors on Toinette’s side, nor did Erik stop and shout a discovery. Even the places where tapestries would have hung in a normal church were bare—but they flickered as Toinette looked at them, gray stone giving way to black void and then returning again in the blink of an eye.

“Saints defend us,” she muttered, equal parts prayer and curse. She’d never thought either would truly be heard before, or at least not answered, no matter what the priests said. Now, after the words had left her mouth, she feared what might listen to them.

* * *

They met again before the altar.

“Nothing,” said Erik, and watched Toinette shake her head in answer. They stood facing each other, a pose that called to mind the mass after a wedding—though any such joining in this church would certainly be cursed from the start, and the progeny likely monsters from the worst of the old tales.

The similarity only reminded him of the difference and made him long for the true version with a strength that took him utterly off guard. He might have spoken then, had Toinette not already been making for the lectern and the immense book open on it, which likely had nothing to do with any scripture he’d ever heard.

“Too much to hope that they kept records, I—faugh!”

She leaned back abruptly from the book, upper lip curling and one hand instinctively raised in defense. As Erik rounded the corner, he could see why.

One page of the book was covered with writing in a small crawling hand. On another yawned a face, one with gaping black holes for eyes above an otherwise featureless dark maw. As Erik watched, the eyes drooped and the mouth opened wider, laughing or screaming, or both.

“Close it,” he said, but Toinette shook her head.

“If it’s trying to scare us, there’s something it doesn’t want us to see.” She bent her head to the paper, squinted, and slowly began reading aloud. “The Year of Our Lord 1308, if God grant my memory serves. Roul ran into the forest, and Amis after him. We found them not, and I fear the worst.

“It corrupts. I think we have contained the worst for now, but without the Order’s greater protections, we may be able to save no more than our souls, if those. Would that this cursed place would meet the fate of Atlantis, and—What’s that?” She looked up and to the side.

“What?” Erik asked. From what he could tell, the rest of the room looked as it always had.

“There was a sort of red flicker. I thought.” Frowning, Toinette shifted her weight to get a better view.

As she moved, Erik did see more, but not the red flash Toinette had mentioned. Instead, he noticed the floor below the altar, and how the edges were wavering just around the lectern. A crack shivered silently into being. Another followed.

He threw himself backward with a shout of alarm. Toinette spun around at the noise. She had a knife in one hand, but that wouldn’t save her. The floor was crumbling rapidly by then, pieces falling away into a lightless void. Her face went white with fear, and she scrambled backward—too slowly.

The last of the floor around the altar disintegrated beneath Toinette’s feet just as Erik wrapped his arms around her. Briefly they both teetered on the edge, balance shifting between solid ground and nothing. Then Erik pulled with all his strength, and Toinette shifted her weight, and they fell, but backward, landing hard on stone whose solidity proved itself along every inch of Erik’s spine.

He didn’t care.

“Damned well didn’t want us reading that book, then,” Toinette said, getting to her feet and straightening her clothing. “I don’t guess it can do that to the rest of the room, or it would have. But I’d as soon not linger.”

Erik rose as well. The place where the altar had stood was now a neat-edged hole, bottomless to all appearances. He looked away swiftly. “Back, then, and try the other door. What did you see?”

“A shape made of red light,” said Toinette. “I didn’t get a very good look at it. It vanished almost as soon as I saw it.”

“Perhaps a sign of the room changing,” Erik said, as they made their way up the aisle, past the polluted font. “I’d not have expected red, though. Nor the light from that direction.”

Toinette nodded. “Nor I. We’d best look if we see it again, though. Whatever it was, it may well have saved us.”