“Hush,” said Meriam. “I wish to hear what he has to say.”
The old man walked to the eastern slope of the hill where it tumbled away sharply into a hollow that then folded up into the barren rock ridges that ran all the way to the eastern horizon. The nearest ridge side was pockmarked with holes.
“Down beneath the hills lie caves. The old ones lived there in the ancient days for a time, but now it is all ruins. Cursed. They worshiped idols and sacrificed children.”
The old man looked each one of them in the eye, as if delving for evil. Zacharias started back when that gaze met his; all his sins seemed to swarm up out of him, naked in the light. But without flinching the old man looked away to examine Marcus, and then Elene, and finally Meriam.
He nodded. “All of these abominations Astareos enjoins us from committing according to the laws of heaven. Do you respect the laws of heaven?”
“Ai, God, Meriam, does he expect us to swear some heathen oath? We worship God in the proper manner. I will not suffer his maundering further, if you please. If the stone crown needs no repair, then there is no reason we cannot make our final calculations tonight and send you and Elene on your way tomorrow evening. The heavens will not slow their workings to accommodate our human frailties. There is much to do—and less time than we need, less than eighteen months until the day we have so long prepared for.”
“Do not be hasty, Marcus. What he knows may be of value to us when we least expect it.”
But although she spoke to the old man for another hour at least, in the end she admitted to Marcus that she had learned nothing beyond local legends of monsters, sandstorms, and lost caverns filled with eyeless snakes. The servants set up tents to shelter them from the winds, and as dusk came, the air quieted, the haze settled, and the stars shone with such brilliance that they looked close enough to reach up and steal.
Marcus took his stylus and wax tablet and sat cross-legged upon the ground, on a blanket, with a lamp burning at his right hand. He scrawled hasty calculations across the surface of the tablet before wiping it clean, muttering all the while.
Zacharias crouched beside him. “Can I learn to do this?”
Marcus replied without glancing up. “Can you write? Have you knowledge of numbers and sums and geometry? No? Then you must wait. I can only teach one step at a time. You must play Brother Lupus’ part now.”
“What is Brother Lupus’ part?”
“Cauda draconis. The tail of the dragon. Least among us. Be still.” It was hard to be still. He wanted what Marcus possessed so badly that his desire was like the grit: everywhere, rubbing in the folds of his skin and at the creases of the corners of his mouth, caught in his eyebrows and worked deep into his hair. Each time he shifted his clothing shed grit, and it filtered through his leggings and his boots to grind between his toes. He had a blister, too, although he had thought his feet too tough to develop anything but calluses.
No man was permitted to build a fire atop the sacred hill, and a cold night wind off the desert wicked away the day’s heat. Zacharias shivered under his cloak as he paced under the moon’s light. To the east distant pricks of light marked the walls of Qahirah, and he saw, surprisingly, the unsteady waver of a campfire in the ruins of Kartiako, briefly glimpsed, then lost. Had he only hallucinated those flames, or had they been extinguished? The barren flat lay so dark and featureless that it seemed more ocean than land. Their position out here, so far from human haunts, seemed precarious although Meriam had hired fully twenty retainers to accompany her. If bandits skulked in the lands hereabouts, surely they did not roam so far into the wasteland.
What was there to kill?
His boot scuffed the ground, and a small object rattled and rolled away from him, coming to rest where the ground sloped slightly up again.
Were those finger bones?
He shuddered and turned back toward the lamp in whose wavering light Marcus sat, with Meriam beside him, making his marks and wiping them clean while the old woman whispered comments. Elene paced among the stones, lifting a staff not longer than her arm and measuring it against the stones and the stars. All of them glanced frequently at the sky.
An unholy cry rose from the east, a moaning that trembled through the clear night air. Meriam’s servants leaped to their feet, but the locals shouted hysterically one to the next and grabbed staves and axes. One man wept.
That moan chilled Zacharias until he shivered, and yet he broke out in a sweat, staring into the darkness. There was nothing to see. A scent drifted over them, borne by the wind: stinking carrion steeped with the sweetness of honey, so reeking and foul that he gagged.
The caretaker appeared from the shadows that half drowned the stones and hurried over to the blanket where Marcus and Meriam worked their equations. He called out to the others, and the locals rushed in a group to huddle within the stones, deathly quiet and obviously frightened.
“No light! No light!” The words came in recognizable Dariyan, and the rigid mask of terror that tightened the caretaker’s eyes could be understood in any language. “Go! Go!”
Too late Marcus pinched out the wick. Meriam’s servants ran to fetch her and carried her within the stone circle as Marcus and Zacharias hurried after. An awful grinding, slithering noise rose from the east.
“Where is Elene?” cried Meriam.
The old man shouted words Zacharias did not know as he lifted his staff above his head. Light sparked from the stone columns. Threads danced between stars and earth to form a shimmering fence woven around the columns, and by that light Zacharias saw, sliding in and out of the light’s verge just beyond the stones, a massive shadow writhing and twisting, first a woman and then a monstrous snake.
The men clustered behind him moaned in terror, crying out “Akreva! Akreva!” and cast themselves on the ground as though prostrating themselves before the Enemy.
“By God’s Name, Meriam, what is that creature?” demanded Marcus.
“Where is Elene?”
A figure darted forward from the hillside where it had strayed, but the hideous woman-snake slithered faster than any earth-bound creature could move and cut off Elene’s retreat. The girl was stuck beyond the safety of the encircling spell, easy prey for the monster as it closed. She raised her staff, but it was a frail stick with which to fend off death.
The choking sound of grief and horror that came from Meriam’s throat catapulted Zacharias into action. He would not stand by as he had when the Quman had attacked the party guarding Blessing outside the walls of Walburg. He would not run away.